As social media content continues to find its way into search engine result pages (SERPs), interesting new data reveals just how much traffic is referred to our s facebook pages from search.  The folks at the very useful Facebook analytics engine PageLever published their analysis of over 1000 fan pages with 10,000 fans or more and found that 33.98% of the referring traffic to these pages came from one of the three major search engines.There are two things about this that I find very interesting:

Firstl, this stat means that about 9.5% of all traffic to  facebook pages comes from search on average.  That is definitely higher than what I would have anticipated.  Also it should be noted that Google is by far the largest contributor to this percentage. Almost 82% of the traffic from search to facebook pages is coming from Google.

The second thing about this that interests me is the degree to which this may impact our content strategies on Facebook.  Good SEO strategies usually begins with good content strategies.  Social media is important outlet for a content strategy.  Therefore, we can now realize how important it is to apply solid content marketing principles, with SEO underpinnings, to our Facebook fan page output whenever it is possible to do so.

I’m not recommending keyword stuffing your posts but just being mindful of the fact that the search engines, Google in particular, are crawling what you create, and they seem to be making more off an effort to make it visible through SERPs.  Well-thought out, useful, entertaining or engaging content is best path towards greater search visibility in all channels.  That’s good news for the marketer and even greater news for the consumer.