I know this might come as a shock to you, so brace yourself: there is more than one person who does what you do online. Shocking, right? Especially if you have a name that might be a little more common or if you work for a company with a name that’s super common, it’s important to get your page found.

We work with a customer, who I shall not name, but their name has been used all over the country and even locally. Even though I’m an administrator on the page, every time I type the name in the whole list comes up. It’s brutal. Let’s talk about how to avoid that and how to make it easier for people to actually find your page.

One of the easiest things you can do is combine your business name with a keyword for an optimized page name. What does that mean? What is the difference between your business name and your user name? User name is how Facebook recognizes you. It’s your specific URL. Mine is Facebook.com/staysocialu. So if you look on your business page, whatever is listed under the name of your business is your user name. If it’s something crazy and a bunch of numbers, that means you haven’t personalized it yet and you need to. Make sure you pick something that you love because it is difficult to change these. Make sure it’s easily identifiable and it matches your brand, and keep it really simple.

Your page name is what you call yourself. These are so difficult to change! I wanted to change my name when I rebranded but they wouldn’t let me, even though “social media” was in the title for both companies. I had to start over and merge both pages, so it can be a painful process. Make sure you’re calling yourself something you really want. To sum up, user name is the @, page name is what you call your business. It means, you might be John Smith, Realtor, but your user name might be “@johnsmithhooverrealtor.” That makes you easier to find. And it’s all about getting found, so make sure it makes sense and is similar enough that people can easily locate you.

Number two is create deliberate search snippets in your “About” section. On your Facebook page, you have a little “About” section where you tell people what you do. Then you have a “Story” section. I see a lot of wasted real estate here. People will say things like, “My uncle started this business 18 years ago–” they don’t care. Tell them immediately what you can do for them in the first sentence that identifies you and makes you unique. So let’s stick with the John Smith example. He’s a Hoover real estate agent. “Selling homes in Hoover for 20 years.” That sums it up, that tells you what he does. You can get more unique, for example, “I work with sellers only,” “I work with buyers only.” Whatever you say in that very first sentence is not only searchable on Facebook and Google, many times that information will pop up immediately when they search for you because it’s the first sentence. Make sure the first thing you say is effective and tells what you bring to the table. You can go on an on in your “About” section and include snippets that you know people are searching for. You can use bullet points and include a list and that’s very searchable.

Number three, please complete all the page information! I should be able to find your phone number, your email, your location, and your business hours. Make sure all your information is complete. And please, check your call to action button. Sometimes it’s broken. I love Facebook, but every now and then it flips out and you have to reset some of the stuff. We had a customer not too long ago whose Twitter account was reset to the wrong account. You need to go in periodically and make sure your information is correct and it works.

The number four tip is — and it might sound silly, but a lot of people forget to do this — include keywords in your actual content on your page. Often we say things in a post in a certain way because that is how it gets attention. If you’re John Smith and you’re selling homes in Hoover, we make sure that exact phrase “selling homes in Hoover” is included in the content. Now you don’t want to be super “sales-y” all the time, but if you have a term that describes you or if you have a keyword search that makes sense for people to find you, use it! You don’t want to use it every day, obviously, but use the 80/20 rule. Everything you do is searchable. Often when we’re looking for content we will put in keyword searches and Facebook will pull up every post that has those mentioned. So if I’m looking for a house in Hoover and you have that search term in ten of your posts over the last two months, you’re going to dominate that news feed. The more they see you, the more likely they are to come to you.

And that’s it, the four simple tips to get your Facebook page found. There’s more than one person doing what you do, there may even be more than person doing what you locally. There are millions and millions of business pages and you want to make sure your potential customers find you first!