Written by james | 01 March 2010
Posted in S.E.O

Google have finally included Facebook in its real time search feature. Public status updates from Facebook Pages will now appear in the real-time search result pages. Now Facebook updates are showing, they can be found, rather prominently, on the first search result pages for some of the hottest trending topics.

But, only updates from Facebook pages are being indexed, which includes photos, videos, links, and status updates shared by page owners and administrators (not fans). This completely ignores the fact that normal users can and have been making public status updates, why are they not being shown? The results coming from other social networks aren’t just from companies and branded sources.

This is showing us that businesses are getting all of the benefits of Facebook being included in the real-time search. With Facebook being the largest social network out there, their results will more than likely end up dominating Google’s real-time search. This means that businesses only will dominate the majority of these results until normal users are included, which makes having a Facebook fan page of great interest to any business/company directors or owners.

Many brands without Facebook fan pages will probably now consider this a good reason to get one, and the pro’s do vastly outweigh the only con, it takes time and effort. But it is free and has an amazing effect on site visitors, company reputation and amount of customers. Now obviously, increased exposure will make the effect greater, and it means the pages should get more fans.

If you want to run a promotion on your fan page, though, be aware that you must have written approval from a Facebook representative. This, according to Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook, will cost you at least ten thousand dollars in Facebook adverts, to acquire. Seems a little much for written permission, and that could make promoting on Facebook unavailable to most not-so-huge businesses, but that doesn’t make owning a Facebook fan page any less valuable.

The list of social media site in which updates are being pulled from are as follows: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, TwitArmy, Google News links, Google Blog Search links, new web pages, and freshly updated pages. At the moment, only the most popular, news-like and trending topics are being shown, but as always the feature will be expanded on at a later date.