What Did Facebook’s New Reactions Do For the Social Science of SEO?

1.59 billion Facebook users were taken off guard when Mark Zuckerberg introduced the five new animated emojis to go along with the “Like” button: “Love”, “Haha”, “Wow”, “Sad”, and “Angry” on Wednesday morning. There was a lot of trial and error that went into choosing which emotions were going to be a part of the launching. One that had been suggested and shocked many users when it wasn’t one of the chosen was “Yay”. That decision was ultimately made because the facial expression was too hard to read by the Facebook users. That is just one of the many things that went into the process of introducing the new and improved feature of Facebook.

 

What Will This Mean For the Future of SEO

Facebook made this transition at a great time. They introduced a long term component to their social media site that makes Facebook users experiences more personalized. That is exactly what search engine optimization is all about.
Keyword placement in URLs have become less of an essential part of successful digital marketing strategies. It’s not complicated. Today the important thing to focus on is gaining traction to increase website traffic. Facebook’s millions of businesses that are promoting themselves, both naturally and paid, both had to adjust to what each new emoji selection meant.
The more frequently a post is Loved on your Newsfeed, the more traffic your site is most likely to achieve. It’s just common sense right? Well another signal that correlates with better website traffic trends is the webpages URL. A higher number of Likes, Loves, or WoWs on a post will then enable a better positioned URL, ultimately resulting in more traffic. Although Google can’t directly “see” how many “Likes” (or Wow’s or Love’s) in order to make it rank higher on Google’s results, they are able to track the shared posts URLs and the number of shares associated with each URL. This creates better social signals to determine your websites ranking.
In order to keep your post viewers attention for as long as possible you need strong, visual, and relevant content. This first part of the content that Facebook users see is the title. This is the only thing drawing your [potential] viewer to your site. If readers are in search of the answer to your title, it better be stated in your blog post or article pretty clearly. This could be the difference between a “Like” or a “Love” which could be the difference of better organic search rankings.
According to Quicksprout adding an image to your social posting is likely to increase engagement by 200%. This is a crucial part of SEO because it is something so simple that makes such an impact. Finally sharing your sites posts on Facebook in order to gather up as many Likes, or Wows as possible is what Mark Zuckerberg envisioned. He wanted to allow users to share more specifically how they felt about posts that they came across. Businesses that post blogs or share other businesses articles do so because they find the information reverent and in hopes to engage others.

 
As we all know there are plenty of benefits of Search Engine Optimization such as increased web traffic, increased leads, gaining traction in your niche market allowing your words to appear on Google closer to the first searched page list. One thing that Facebook users may not be taking into consideration when trying to implement a strategy to gain positive traction is how to engage their viewers by creating content that is sharable and “Love(d)” quality. Creating content on Facebook that contains the proper key words will ultimately bring in more traffic.

How this Will Effect Social Engagement

The lively reactions of 5 new emojis are a major part of what is going to come next for the evolution of social engagement. Although Facebook users do a lot of searching on laptops and desktops, more and more social media is being accessed through a mobile device. For this reason, Facebook needed to make sure their partnerships, especially with eCommerce companies were closely tight to assure top notch quality when it came to consistency on both desktops and mobile devices.
Lets talk about Facebook and Shopify.
Shopify allows their clients to sell their products straight through Facebook. Its fully integrated store essentially allows you to not have to leave the Shop section on Facebook. Shopify is simply letting users view, choose, and checkout all while still logged onto their Facebook page, rather than having to leave Facebook and go to the company’s homepage website and to then have to search around to try and locate the shirt you saw on your newsfeed.  This was designed for the half billion mobile Facebook users that use their phone on a day-to-day basis.
Facebook and Shopify have a relationship that is beneficial to one another. It’s now improved (mostly to benefit Shopify) with the 5 new reactions that have been released. I mention this because once you’ve made your decision to lets say Love a shirt you spotted on an advertisement on Facebook, your friends will see it. Once your friends see it, they may Like it or Love it too because they secretly envy your style. That brings Shopify sites more traffic, and overall more business in their niche market.

The Newest Metrics Social Media Marketers Need to Watch

The most important thing that you ask yourself as a marketer when speaking in terms of metrics is whether the metrics you’re being provided with are useful or not. If you’re not going to use the data that is being collected, why bother collecting it in the first place? So when deciding for your business what you are trying to achieve whether it’s a gain in ROI or as simple as increasing your organic search numbers make sure you are gathering the appropriate data to help your business excel.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a privately accessed page by businesses that are a part of the Facebook community. This is a page that allows Page Managers to access the Insights about people’s activity on their page. It’s a great way to track user interaction! The new reactions will be able to be tallied just as the Likes were able to be tallied in the Page Insights, which will give administrators a better idea how their page viewers specifically think and feel about each post they publish. You will notice that the 5 reactions will work the same way that the Likes data works; you will be able to see how page viewers feel about your postings. Depending on the results of your data, which you should be checking on a weekly basis, you should be posting content and information relating to what your viewers Like (or Love). Even an article that makes people feel Sad or Angry, but has amazing content will grab your audiences attention and your site will gain traction which you will be able to notice on Facebook Insights.
Reach Metrics
This metric is helpful when you’re trying to figure out if the effort you have put in to boost your site engagement has been working or not. You are able to base this off of the data collected such as page/posts activity, positive and negative activities of Likes (or Wows or Loves!), comments, or shares, etc. The Reach Metrics is simple enough, if you can understand what you are looking for. A lot of digital marketing teams like to focus on the amount of people or as Facebook Insight calls them, “Fans” your company has in total. What they really need to look at is the percentage of that total that is actually touching your publicly displayed information or posts. If you have 70,000 fans, that’s great… But what if you’re only attractive to 2,500 of those fans? That isn’t very productive or satisfactory.
Organic refers to people who are able to reach your Facebook page postings for free. So organic reach is when people are able to scroll through Facebook and take notice of your business’s post. Unfortunately organic search has declined in the past couple of years, upsetting a lot of businesses. There are many reasons as to why this is happening such as more and more users handing out Likes more nonchalantly nowadays more than ever before. By doing that, they are not really showing what really is important to them and what they are actually truly personally interested in. More overall Facebook posts means less attention for the overall businesses who actually rely on Organic Reach.

 
Paid refers to the number of people who view your post because it was promoted by your business. There are different ways that paid promotions get displayed to viewers. One being they are posted on the newsfeed of Facebook users, and two the side bar ad display. Both are affective but if you are looking at the statistical results you will quickly be able to read that the side bar ad numbers will be increasingly higher than the initial newsfeed promotional ad. This is because side bar ads pop up more consistently but businesses need to be careful when choosing what to display with the limited amount of text space; hindering mobile interaction.
Quantitative VS Qualitative
Quantitative data is focused on the numeric analysis of the data that is collected, it is straight forward. This can be the number of Likes, Followers, or Comments that you receive on a post. With the new reactions being introduced to Facebook, you are most likely going to be gathering data that can be tested and shows to be statistically significant. One of the most important metrics to company’s that are posting on Facebook almost daily is the engagement that their posts are actually getting. The number of Likes, or Loves, or Angry faced reactions will give the company a better idea of what their viewers are looking for. This will effect the upcoming posts in the future, based on prior reactions to prior posts.
Qualitative data can be measured by Facebook easily by looking at things like the time spent on site, error rate over a certain period of time, or users satisfaction. These metrics should be able to answer questions about how to fix certain problems that occur. This is important for the newly introduced reactions on Facebook because even though there was plenty of time put into the digital research before the launch of these reactions, you don’t know specifically how your websites response will be hindered. The outcome when researching qualitative data is to be able to find a problem and then find a solution to that problem. If the new reactions work out as planned, your website should be increasing in engagement, but then marketers must ask themselves, what does an increase in a Like mean if there is just as many Angry reactions to a post. Or maybe even how are businesses supposed to compare what a Like means to a Love or a Wow.