Using Facebook Groups to Influence Google AI Overviews | James Dooley Interviews Dan M. Jones

James Dooley (0:00)

Influencing Google AI Overviews with Facebook Groups. Today I'm joining with Dan M. Jones.

And Dan, I want you to jump straight in. So how can a Facebook group influence what's being said in the Google AI Overview?

Dan M. Jones (0:17)

So I guess the short version is, is that the posts that you make, if you're posting them into a Facebook group, seem to do really well at getting pulled in to the AI Overviews. But the way that we found out about this was actually when I was getting a member of my team to promote our Toastmasters Club. I used to be president of a Toastmasters Club, and I used to get a member of my team to dedicate some time to just posting some stuff about it online. And we were trying out a lot of different things to see what would actually bring members in. And when I would go and ask members, one of the ones that was getting a bit of traction was Facebook groups. So basically looking for local groups, like business owner groups in your area.

So Manchester way, so in Manchester or maybe like events in Manchester, anything that's relevant. We didn't do anything irrelevant because then you'd get the admin to boot you out. But we were posting in the relevant groups. And people would start coming along. So I'd say, how did you hear about? I'd say, I saw you on Facebook. But then what happened was, and funnily enough, I mean, we didn't really do too much SEO stuff being an SEO agency. But then a few people started saying, I saw you on Google. And I thought to myself, what's going on there then? Because we've not really done anything on Google. What we've done is just promoted on Facebook. So I started looking into it. Anyway, what I realized was, we was actually, because the girl that was doing it, the social media for me, she understands writing content from an SEO perspective. So she's writing it with all our keywords in there and doing all that stuff. Now, when I was looking in Google for public speaking Manchester, our little Toastmasters Club was coming up in the AI overviews because it was pulling in a bunch of different posts from the Facebook groups. So then we started reverse engineering. I kind of stumbled upon it. It wasn't like I had this great strategy. We just kind of realized it and I was like, bloody hell, this is working really well. So what we realized is that if you're posting in a public group, those are indexable. And now, I'll be honest with you James, I don't know the ins and outs as to why this works as well as it does, but I have a suspicion that it's because the other posts within that group seem to reference it. So when I was searching for that exact string of what it was that she'd posted, a load of other posts were coming up. And when you clicked on them, they weren't our post, but at some point Google must have indexed it as like a related post or whatever on Facebook.

So those posts, I don't know if it works as an internal link or something like that, but the other thing we were doing as well is getting a bunch of us to do engagement on it. So thumbs up, the heart and the care emoji. So let's say there's only three of you doing it, that still looks like there's a lot of engagement. We were doing that because we were basically trying to get it to look like there was stuff going on without loads going on, if you know what I mean. If it's all just thumbs up, it don't look that much, right? So that's another thing. And it was interesting talking to Jesper about this the other day because he seems to have found a correlation between the thumbs up on, I believe it was LinkedIn he was saying, and that helping a LinkedIn post rank higher in Google. Well, I think the same thing's happening on Facebook as well because that's what seemed to be going on there. So yeah, I mean, if you're writing those posts, as long as they're indexable inside of a public group in Facebook, you can end up actually influencing the AI for stuff. I mean, that's a competitive term right there. It's not like that's something that no one's gone after. We've made up a term. People are searching for that, it's got decent search volume. We're coming up right at the top. Now, those posts obviously also rank in Google as well. So that's the other side of it. But yeah, I mean, it is actually one of the more effective things that most people don't know.