Facebook profile as resume - should LinkedIn worry?

Guess who's Facebook targeting this time? Answer - it's LinkedIn, clearly. While Facebook, with their ~1 billion users gets the title of the world's biggest social network, LinkedIn has ruled the professional world for a long time now by branding itself as the professional network for the suit and tie types. Both these leading networks have focused on one thing - networking. While Facebook focused on offering more facilities and entertainment value to the masses, LinkedIn distinguished itself by offering professional networking tools, facilities, recommendations etc. But with China not opening its gates to Facebook to acquire their billion users, Facebook's now looking to eat from LinkedIn's tiffin.

Search Your Name On Google

Everyone loves searching their name on Google and until now, the most common results to occupy the top spot were from 'LinkedIn' (being a professional profile); and Facebook getting one of the top 5 spots in most of the cases. But as Amit Agrawal of Your Facebook Pages have a Résumé - Digital Inspiration notices, Facebook is testing a new keyword in the Facebook page titles and that magical word is Résumé - aka your professional profile. Note that the functionality is limited to the Facebook pages at this time. What Facebook does is offer the keyword in page-title, visible only to the search engines and people who are not logged in. That means, search engines are likely to put your Facebook page on the top of search results for the keywords that involve your name. It's the little SEO trick, you know.

[caption id="attachment_42863" align="aligncenter" width="640"] CrazyEngineers Fans - Resume - Interesting, Isn't It?[/caption]

Facebook Profiles As Your 'Resume'

I'm only speculating at the moment, but there's a good chance that Facebook might just extend the 'resume' appended title to your personal profiles to extract more SEO juice. It's no brainer that a lot of searchers on Google would be for people's names and in most of the cases, those who have a profile on LinkedIn have outranked Facebook. But that may just change in near future. The famous personalities won't have to worry because they'll have their own Wikipedia page dedicated to them which will anyway outrank all the other pages because its a known fact that Google is deeply in love with Wikipedia. But for the lesser mortals like you and I, Facebook profiles might just take the #1 spot in search results.

Build Your Facebook Profile Seriously

If Facebook decides to go with 'resume' in the page titles for your personal profiles, you might have to consider editing your FB profile and make it look more professional. You'd certainly want your prospective employers to know about your achievements in Open Source world and Java and not at the pub last night. You got the idea.

Should LinkedIn Worry? Yes! It Should!

Though each of the professional networks have their own loyal audience, Google still plays a major role in the organic growth of these networks; especially LinkedIn. LinkedIn benefits by ranking top in search engines for people's names. But if Facebook begins outranking it; LinkedIn going to lose a significant amount of traffic and the ad-dollars. It would be interesting to see how Facebook gets into the professional networking game and even more interesting to watch how LinkedIn responds.

We'll keep following the updates on this front and keep you updated.