In recent months there has been a lot of talk about making sure people used search engine optimization (SEO) for their tweets as Twitter became an increasingly popular search engine. Now with the introduction of an improved search function from Facebook, SEO may be coming into play in social media.

This week Facebook announced that it would be rolling out a new search function which it had been testing since July. The new search will allow users to look into the last 30 days of their news feed – giving them results from friends and the pages they are fans of.

But in addition, Facebook users will see results from people they are not friends with if those people have opted to have their content made available.

With a growing number of companies using Facebook to increase their online visibility, this new development might make the search engine optimization (SEO) of their status update and other uploads more important.

It also appears that after getting rebuffed by Twitter last year, Facebook is looking to create a "lite" feature that makes people’s updates more closely resemble tweets.

A number of reports indicate that some Facebook users were notified last night that they would be testing "Facebook Lite" – a more basic version of the site which some have said closely resembles what one might see when looking at a Twitter profile. However, it appears that the notifications were mistakenly sent out too early as the link to the new "lite" site disappeared soon after the messages were sent.

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.