Whether or not you are a power-using millennial who lives on Facebook, the importance these days of social media platforms like Facebook as part of your marketing portfolio cannot be ignored. But when posting popular content, a question comes up as to whether this can actually hurt your SEO? The answer is NO, it helps, and this article explains why.

 
How Can Facebook Help Grow Your Business?
 
To understand how posting potentially impacts your search engine optimization ("SEO"), it helps to start by looking at how using Facebook can grow your business. As a social media platform, Facebook serves many purposes, but for growing your business, let's focus on three ways that your potential clients (not merely friends and family) use Facebook:

 
- Follow: The best impact that Facebook can have on helping you grow your business is when potential clients choose to follow your Facebook business page. This keeps your name in front of them, and increases the likelihood that they will share your posts and be seen by their followers. Consistently posting good quality content is the key to attracting potential clients as followers. That is, posting content that they find useful and valuable on an on-going basis.

 
- Check: Even if they are not following you, the other use of your Facebook business page by potential clients is that they view it as part of their checking to see who you are. It may start with them checking out your website. And when they see the Facebook icon there, it opens the door for them to check your Facebook page. And once again, having on-going good quality content is a key to demonstrating the substance of your business.

 
- Search: And then there is when potential clients do a search on Facebook. Here again, the more good quality content you have consistently being posted, the more likely you are to be found. But in reality, when someone is searching for a local inspector or real estate agent, most likely they will be searching using a search engine like Google, rather than the search bar in Facebook. And for a lot of reasons, search engines like Google are not even able to fully index inside of Facebook pages.

 
So for all of these, consistent posting of quality content is king. And for the purpose of generating business from potential clients, the more quality content you post, the better. Regarding generating business by placing paid ads or boosting posts on Facebook, these are topics for another time.

 
What About 'Duplicate Content'?
 
Posting so-called 'duplicate content' refers to posting links to content that others may also be posting. And the question comes up "Does posting duplicate content hurt my SEO?" No, it does not.

 
Let's say that the New York Times publishes an article online that is interesting and helpful. There could be literally thousands of people who post a link to this article. And when they do, what will be posted on all of their Facebook pages is the image, title, and description from the article, which Facebook automatically fetches from the article's "og" HTML tags ("og" tags are in the webpage's HTML code so that Facebook can automatically fetch info such as image, title, and description).

 
Facebook (and Facebook users) do NOT punish its members for spreading the word about an attractive page link. On the contrary, Facebook (and especially Facebook users) reward its members for being consistently active on their Facebook accounts, and for providing valuable content.

 
Engagement Affect?
 
One of the metrics that Facebook provides to help you gauge the performance of your Facebook business page is called "engagement," which measures how many likes and shares you have for the number of posts that you have. When consistently adding more posts (especially if you are posting every day), it is easy to think that because your engagement number may be going down, that this is "bad." But it is more important to focus on how it increases the weekly activity metric of your Facebook business page, and more importantly, how good quality content being consistently posted on your page makes your page more valuable to potential clients, and therefore helps you to grow your business.

 
So does posting popular content hurt your SEO? No. Does it help? Definitely.