Earlier today I was trying to figure out Social Search but I ended learning about what I thought an "inexistent" feature of Facebook. 

As per my knowledge, all social networking sites are designed to be no-index | no-follow sites - meaning: they can't be crawled by the search engines EXCEPT for the personalized profile name or ID or Facebook Fanpage URL. For example, if you search your name in google, most likely the Facebook profile will show up unless you used a different profile ID name. But if we talk about what you post in your Facebook, it is designed not to be shown in the search engines.

What I find out today was that the "Album Name" of any Facebook Fanpage is indexable. So if you type an album name in google, specially if the album name is very specific, it'll show up in the search results. 

Let me give you an example (one international brand and one local brand).

If you type in Google: "Reasons to Believe in a Happier Tomorrow", one of the results would be the Facebook Photo Album from Coca-Cola's Facebook Fanpage. Please see screenshot below.

Second example: type in "Davao Housing Madness", you'd see one of the results is the photo album of BPI Loan Facebook Fanpage. 

You can try it for yourself and see if your company are ranking for the album names you specified. This (as I've mentioned earlier) however, does not work for the personal profiles. I have tried it and it failed. But if you were able to replicate it using your own personal profile page, feel free to correct me in this post! =)

Main takeaway for these two examples: The title and description of the album you created in your fanpages will be indexed by Google and it will be shown to people searching in Google using the keywords you used as album title. The more specific it is, the better its search-ability (remember the coke keyword). As you can see, for the second example, the keywords does not refer to BPI Loan but the BPI Loan fanpage is shown if these keywords [Davao Housing Madness] were Googled by random people from Davao. 

SO WHAT NOW?

Anyway, the question now is WHAT'S THE POINT of knowing this? The point ladies and gentlemen is that there might be keywords that are high in search volume and with low or medium competition that you can use to drive traffic to your official fanpage. With the added credibility of Facebook, it can boost these chosen keywords to rank in the first page (or even number one) in Google search results. 

TIP: If you have an SEO team or if you know an SEO practitioner, feel free to consult them how to determine the best keywords for your album by performing Keyword Research. 

PRACTICAL APPLICATION:

As a brand manager, you can determine keywords that you would want to target, and if your company or brand website does not show up in these keywords then the potential of getting this 'searcher' as a customer or subscriber to your website is lost. But your Facebook fanpage might do the trick. 

So to illustrate using a simple process flow:

Internet User Searches for specific "keywords" -> Google Shows Relevant Results but no link to you company page -> User Sees a link to a Facebook Page with Description -> User clicks -> User directed to Fanpage -> Fanpage has basic information about the company with link to company website or customer hotline -> User is exposed to the brand/company -> user is either converted by becoming a fan or contacting the company for more details OR user leaves the fanpage because it's not relevant. 

WHEW! simple right? =P

The point I'm trying to make is you can use this feature to pump up your album names and be seen on keywords that users are looking for. Who knows, one of those users might be your biggest client who just happen to stumble upon your company fanpage. 

Okay, I hope in some way this post will help you customize your company pages in Facebook to rank in Google and other search engines. 

Till next time!