Facebook Search Engine Also Delivers Website Visitors

The Facebook search engine is a good source of visitors to websites that post links there.

The social media giant is mostly known among website publishers for pages where they microblog. Publishers post a brief item, ideally including a photo, that also has a link to an expanded article on their websites.

Those social postings produce website visitors who may click on ads, buy something, subscribe or take other actions that financially benefit the website.

What is not widely known is the long-term value of postings that are searchable in Facebook’s search engine.

Facebook Search Engine Benefits

Social media postings benefit some categories more than others. For example, news pages on Facebook have high click rates to the full articles on media websites. But other categories such as retail have low click rates.

Publishers of categories with low click rates understandably get discouraged and give up on posting on Facebook. But they still have an opportunity to take advantage of the search engine if they emphasize hashtags and keywords.

The simple answer: They strategically place postings that have a high probability of Facebook users finding them when they use the search engine rather than going to the website’s page.

Unlike news sites, publishers in low click categories don’t have to post articles daily or multiple times a day. They may post at their leisure such as weekly and focus on careful placement.

For example, a travel website posts an article about Caribbean cruises, uses that phrase in the post and uses it again in a hashtag such as #caribbeancruises.

Many Facebook users may not go to the page with the post because they don’t “follow” the page or even know that it exists.

But if they enter the above hashtag or simply the phrase “caribbean cruises” in the search engine, they may find the post and click on the link to the full article.

This is a long-term strategy for the Facebook search engine. It means that getting people to the page is desirable but not always necessary to get clicks.