As Facebook continues to grow and provide more and more search functionality so does the need to think strategically about optimizing some of your status updates.

About six months ago Facebook introduced status tagging, a feature that allows you to tag and link to pages and people that you like from your updates. When writing an update you simply start with @ and the person you want to tag and Facebook will add a link in the update to that person and (depending on privacy settings) post your update to their wall and notify them they’ve been tagged. (The tagged person can always undo the tag)

Careful use of this practice can lead to increased exposure of your updates and pages. Somewhat recently Facebook also started building “community pages” – a way to build pages on topics and help bring people together around common interests. While most of these pages exist purely from people saying they like something on their profile, some have begun to get some real niche followers and traction.

It’s beginning to make sense for people on Facebook to start to take the time to research topics related to their business, interests and industry and start “liking” a number of popular community pages with an eye on status tagging these pages in your updates.

Here’s an example. Yesterday I wrote about public speaking and mentioned the popular TED Talks and Toastmasters groups in my post. I went to Facebook to share the link for the blog post and tagged the public speaking, TED talks, and Toastmasters International community pages. This action placed my update on all three of these community pages and exposed it to another 30,000 or so potential readers. (You must be a fan of these pages to use the tagging feature and there may be a lag in the time you like them and they show up in tagging.)

Because TED is so popular (over 500,000 fans) I also took the time to post to the TED page wall. Understand that this was content that was very relevant to this audience and not just a post to grab eyeballs. Strategic optimization of your status updates can take a little more time and thought, but the additional exposure through sharing quality content and updates is becoming well worth the time.

I wonder how this might become a play for local businesses routinely tagging community pages for their city?