I often hear the question from people about Facebook and SEO and if there is a connection or not. Officially Facebook data is used by Bing, but not by Google. Bing (Microsoft) is actually a minority shareholder of Facebook and the 2 companies came to an agreement of Facebook data being used within Bing search results. It is not officially confirmed though that a Facebook page will help with your Bing rankings, but even without official confirmation I would leave this untouched accordingly.

Google on the other side has no official relationship with Facebook, but some observers in the search engine optimization field believe that there is a strong relationship between Google search rankings and Facebook. This might not be based on actual data integration, but if your content becomes popular on Facebook and lots of people visit your website from Facebook this might count as a signal for Google search rankings.

My approach is to setup a Facebook account no matter what. Don’t use it for SEO purposes, but to interact with your customers and fans. if additional benefits come out of this effort, even better. Social media is not going away and it has grown stronger and stronger over the years. Many business owners do not see the need for being active on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but just think about new generations of customers down the road. The kids from today will grow up with smart phones and the Internet being a major part of their life’s. They do not know differently and if you are advertising on the Yellow pages, but your customers are on Facebook then you are off the chart.