For those of you who were thinking about defrauding Facebook with fake accounts, fake fans on your page, etc., here’s a word of advice: don’t bother.

Facebook recently announced that they are taking measures to cut down on junk accounts and invalid ‘likes’ on fan pages.

This is just the latest in a series of recent moves by big internet companies to provide higher quality content to their users. More and more, the trend has been toward authentic, useful content and away from the old standards of keyword density and meta tags.

For the small business, this trend is in fact great news. The key to social media success, as we’ve said before, is true engagement with your audience. You small businesses out there most likely already engage in meaningful dialogue with your audience, so this puts you ahead of the curve. Keep it up! Chances are your page is not one that saw its list of Like-ers plummet in recent weeks.

If you’ve been following our blog, perhaps you’ve noticed that it always seems to come back to the same themes: authenticity, engagement, and consistency. Whatever else your internet marketing strategy involves, these three are critical. Get them wrong and you’re only digging yourself into a hole.

A good means of getting found online is to create a solid online footprint, following those principles. Next week we’ll take a peek at what that means and how you can do it.