Ok, so you have joined the Social Media revolution. You have one of the basics covered with Facebook but just being out there only keeps you in the game. What you need now is to take the next step and find a way to enhance your position. Something that can help with online reputation management, brand visibility, and customer engagement all at the same time. So what is this glorious next step? Well, I can name that tune in one note… Optimization. Or to be more specific, optimizing your presence to maximize your reach. I know what you are thinking, “that sounds great, but it also sounds complicated”. Well, it is a lot simpler than you might think.

Here are some simple steps that you can take to optimize your online presence to help your new social media presence help you:

Branding
First things first. Before you do anything else you need to make sure that you are properly branded on your Facebook Fan Page. This is easy enough to do as long as you have at least 25 Fans already in place. Once you have 25 fans, Facebook will allow you to create a Vanity Name for your page so rather than www.facebook.com/80536624725 you can have www.facebook.com/GraphicTechnique. Big difference right? So instead of an accountants nightmare for a URL, you can make sure that people know who they are going to see and more importantly, they can then more easily tell their friends :). Just make sure to choose wisely when you setup your name because there are no takesy backsies. Once it is set you are stuck so make sure to come as close to your brand as possible when creating your ID.

Linking
It sounds pretty simple but you would be surprised how many companies do not take the simple step of connecting their website to their Facebook page. You have seen it on many sites and likely used it one some of them too. That little blue “F” icon that connects your brand to your new social network. You can do it any way you like and get as creative as you want with the art you use for the link (just make sure to brand it when you do by using your Facebook Page Vanity Name). Then just make sure to add it to as many of your pages as possible to increase the number of links to your page.

Accumulation
Now is where you bring the traffic by accumulating fans (or “Likes”) by driving traffic to your page. First up you can try some of the widgets that Facebook offers to display fan page content within your websites. You can follow it up with staying active on your page so that your content gets out there in the news feed. And if you are feeling really frisky you can even sponsor content or place ads on Facebook to help draw in new blood.

Once you are done setting up the basics for your Facebook traffic, it will be time to put the social media circle of life into motion letting Facebook show you some of its hidden potential by allowing it to drive traffic back to your regular website. Simply add Share and Like buttons to the nuggets of wisdom on your site and sit back and watch your brilliance be spread to the content hungry masses.

As your social media circle builds steam so to will the search engine links that help drive your organic SEO. And that organic SEO boost will in turn add more positive links for reputation management, which will also increase you brand visibility and customer engagement opportunities.

Now if you only had a blog things could be really awesome…