Almost every social networking site offers a feature called a “profile” that allows members to include their picture, a biography, live links to their websites and other detailed information. Most of us have multiple online profiles that are empty or only partially completed. It is this profile that helps other users decide if they want to work with you. Another perk of online profiles is that the live links pointing to your website may impact your search engine ranking.

It is very important that you think of these profiles as your own “Public Relations Department or Media Room”, specifically designed to sell you and your business. Imagine that you only have a few seconds to sell a new prospect on why they should want to get to know you and possibly do business with you. What is said and offered during these few seconds can make all the difference in the world. This is EXACTLY why your online profiles need to be completed to capture the attention of anyone who visits these sites.

Let’s look at the different aspects of social networking profiles and what information and content you should include to ensure that you get the maximum results. The following information may or may not be included in every profile, but the majority of it is standard:

Your Picture – Your photo is the first thing people will see upon visiting your profile or when reading your posts. How does it represent you? Wearing a tank top while giving the peace sign with a beer in your hand is not the way to impress potential clients. If you are looking for clients, then professionalism is a must. You can show SOME personality in your photograph but try to strive for conservative whenever possible.

Your Biography – This is your chance to tell others more about you, such as interesting aspects of your life and what makes you, YOU. Take your time here, as this area is the equivalent of sitting down with a prospect and telling them exactly why they should do business with you. Include specifics about your expertise, your business, how you have helped others and even your personal philosophies. You want others to be excited about connecting with you and this is YOUR time to shine.

Links – Make sure to include helpful links in order to allow others to find you online. A link to your website, your blog and additional information about your business is crucial. However, some people make the mistake of including each and every link that points to a profile of theirs online. If you have 25 social networking memberships, it is NOT advisable to include them all here. A good idea would be to vary these links on every website where you have a profile.

Contact Information – You have to include contact information if you want people to have the ability to contact you. Do not try to hide at this point. Many people have the wrong opinion that they should NOT put contact information in their profile, assuming that people contacting you for business purposes is a bad thing. Would you include your contact information in a yellow pages ad? Then why not provide it online? Please only include information you want to be made public.

Interests – Do you like to play golf, workout, volunteer or build model airplanes? You might be surprised that many people would be interested in connecting with you just based upon similar hobbies and interests. This connection can lead to a deepening friendship that may lead to business and even referrals down the road.

Education – While some people may or may not care about your schooling, including specifics about your education can do two things to help you add to the number of responses. First of all, those who went to school where you did may want to connect. Secondly, by offering details about your education, it will help others to see your experience and expertise in various areas.

Favorite Movies or Books – While you may not see the correlation between your favorite movie and a potential new client, trust me, it exists. Just like much of the information above, the information in your profile is designed to help you connect with potential clients and to build business relationships. Sometimes, simply sharing your favorite movie can be the start of a beautiful business relationship.

Testimonials from Past Clients – One of the best ways to demonstrate your ability to help others is by including testimonials from past or current satisfied clients. These testimonials will help others to get a snapshot of some of the work you have done in the past and help to build a foundation of a great business relationship.

Looking at the líst above, there is a lot of information that should be included in each and every social networking profile. Because of this, many people decide to skimp and their profile winds up being about 3 or 4 sentences long. This is a mistake. It is better to leave a profile blank than to create such a lackluster one. If you need inspiration, visit some of the most popular social networking sites and read a few profiles to get some idea of how to get started.

If filling out multiple social networking profiles is too much for your busy day, you might look at getting help from a virtual assistant. Many of them have experience in this area and can create a compelling COMPLETE profile that will best represent you AND your business. We live in a world of social networking … making it a part of your business marketing simply makes sense. Take the time to do it right or hire someone who can do it for you.

Facebook Gives Businesses More Data to Measure

At this point, most businesses have probably come to the realization that they are missing out on some serious opportunities if they do not have a Facebook presence. Facebook is showing that it will keep growing, despite all of the recent privacy concerns capturing the media’s attention, and more and more sites across the web continue to get integrated with Facebook, which means Facebook is becoming more and more integrated into people’s online activity in general. While this in itself means great things for businesses, Facebook is now offering businesses new tools to better understand data around user engagement with their brands so they can take advantage of it and better monetize their Facebook presence.

Facebook has now made significant improvements to its analytics for websites, applications, and Pages. This means businesses have increased insights into how people are engaging with their Facebook presence on and off their sites.

Improved Analytics

The improved analytics come in the form of the new Insights Dashboard, which shows data for fully-integrated sites and sites that use Facebook’s social plug-ins. You can also add a non-integrated domain. In addition, the Dashboard displays data from application, including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop apps. Finally, it displays data around Facebook Pages – those created on Facebook itself, and those that are part of Facebook’s Open Graph.

To put it into simpler terms, you can view analytics around specific stories that people “like” on your site, or how many users commented on posts made on your Facebook Page. “From there, you will have a better idea of what your audience finds most interesting and capitalize on that content,” says Facebook’s Alex Himel.

The dashboard has been around for a while, but now it contains more data, as well as new visualization tools. You can view graphs in full screen, print them, or save them. Facebook has also released a new demographics visualization, which shows more info about the audience that is interacting with your site, your Facebook Page, or your app if you have one. Obviously, this can be of tremendous benefit to your marketing efforts.

“As a domain administrator, you can now access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience,” says Himel. Of course growing your audience brings new opportunities for monetization.

Important Info for Webmasters

Site owners should associate their domain with a user ID, Facebook app, or Facebook Page that they administer. This can be done by clicking the green “Insights for your Domain” button on the dashboard and adding the meta tag that is generated within the &’head> tags of the root page on the domain. Note that if your site utilizes subdomains, the root file of each one must be claimed separately.

“If you administer a Facebook Page or have integrated the Open Graph protocol into your Web pages, you can now see analytics for referral traffic and stream stories in the Insights dashboard, as well as tab views for your Page,” says Himel. “Insights will capture engagement with Pages regardless of whether an action was taken on or off Facebook.”

The Bigger Picture

One of the biggest gripes businesses have had with social media, is a lack of measurement. Clearly, Facebook is doing more to tackle this problem, and Facebook is obviously the social network that gives businesses the potential to reach the largest amount of people. Recent estimates have Facebook with close to 500 million users.

It also doesn’t hurt to keep in mind that Facebook is evolving, and rapidly at that. It is already competing with Google for unique visitors (which really equates to mindshare during time spent online). Some may consider such a comparison apples and oranges, but there may be more to it than that.

Google is starting to make some significant moves that may give Google Buzz a significant boost. For example, this week, a “Reshare” button was announced. This is essentially Google’s version of the retweet. If you follow a Buzz user who posts an interesting update, you can hit the “reshare” button (down with the comment, like, and email buttons) to repost that post to your own Buzz stream. Reshare only works for public posts. Private posts will not have the reshare link. However, you can reshare posts yourself publicly or privately. If a lot of people you follow reshare the same post, the similar posts will be collapsed.

“You’ll notice that resharing creates a new post, effectively forking the conversation. To fork or not fork was a decision we debated for a while,” says Buzz software engineer Sam Goto. “Ultimately, we think forked conversations help create more varied, intimate discussions around a single item. We realize people may want a non-forking version too, so we’re thinking about how to do that as well.”

“When there is a chain of reshares, the names of all of the people who publicly reshare the post appear on the original item, even if they’re not directly connected to the original author,” Goto explains. “If you share something that ends up getting passed around by lots of other people, it’s pretty cool to see that.”

It’s also worth noting that you can “like” a reshare, and that will not translate to a “like” for the original post. This means you can like a comment without liking what the comment is about.

Google also announced that it’s releasing an XHTML version of the Buzz website which can be accessed from many mobile devices like those running Android pre-2.0, Blackberry, Nokia S60, and Windows Mobile. This could go a long way for getting Buzz used by mobile users across a broader range of devices.

Google Buzz launched earlier this year to a great deal of hype – and why not – a potential Facebook/Twitter competitor from the giant that is Google – but much of the “buzz” about Buzz has faded in the months since. In fact, most of the discussion in the media about Buzz has been centered around privacy issues (though that has become considerably less rampant…Facebook has filled that role nicely).

As we’ve been saying since long before Buzz was announced, the key to a Google social network offering is in the integration with its other products. This made launching Buzz within Gmail seem like a smart move, but there is still much work to be done if Buzz is to become a real player in the space.

Adding features, such as the reshare feature is a start, but what may have a more significant impact was an announcement that came last week.

During Google I/O, I attended a session in which Google quietly announced the launch of the Buzz API. The news was generally overshadowed by other Google announcements, such as the unveilings of Google TV and FroYo, but with developers getting access to the Buzz API, there is room for much to be done around the service in terms of third-party apps, which should ultimately make Buzz much more useful. That’s what happened with Twitter. Developers like TweetDeck, Boxee, Buzzzy, Klout, Meebo, Seesmic, Vinehub, Shareaholic, and other have already taken advantage of the Buzz API.

It’s hard to say if the general public will find a real need for Buzz alongside Facebook, Twitter and other services, but as Google grows its presence in mobile via Android, and soon into television via Google TV, there will be more potential gateways for Buzz adoption, as well as integration.

Blogging, tweeting, friending. Odd sounding verbs, these. Not sure you’ll find them in the “verb” category in the dictionary ~ at least not yet. Give them time. “Ain’t” made it in, and that verb didn’t have nearly the grassroots support of these three.

Indeed, this triad of “new verbs” are both the result and the harbinger of the most prominent types of social networks and Social Media Marketing in the world today: personal and professional blogs (with RSS feeds so you can stay “tuned in”), Twitter (the “mini-blog” suited to the info-bites attitude and fast-forward pace of our lives in the 21st century), and Facebook (the global water-cooler). As the Bible says of Faith, Hope, and Love, these three remain. Blogging, Twitter, and Facebook: which is “the greatest of these” remains to be seen.

In the realm of the online marketplace, however, it’s no contest. The wínner is: all three of them. They are the leaders of the newest form of network marketing and one of the most effective: Social Media Marketing.

Why is it so effective? Three reasons that are particularly attractive to small business and other entrepreneurs: low impact/annoyance factor, cost effectiveness, and a viral spread of information.

1. Low Impact (and therefore low annoyance factor) :-

In the same way that email rapidly replaced telephone contact and so called “face time,” blogging, Twitter, and Facebook are replacing other more traditional forms of marketing, and for the same reasons.

Emailing became the norm for the “sender” of information because it was easier (both physically and emotionally) than making a phone call or meeting with someone in person. Email grants immediate completion and instant gratification: No getting a busy signal or, worse, an answering machine or voice mail inbox that required you to leave a message (wherein you might say the wrong thing and not be able to erase and re-record) and no having to carry on an unscripted conversation with someone in person (wherein the same dangers were ever present). The receiver was equally blessed by the ability to respond (or not) at his or her leisure and with the same assurance of faux pas-free “conversation.”

Social Media does the same for marketing by freeing the marketer to place his or her “ads” at any time, around the clock, 24/7, rather than to some PR office or publisher’s schedule, while simultaneously granting the target audience the ability read/view and/or delete at will instead of having to dispose of or recycle the publication, and all for the low, low price of . . . well, nothing.

Which naturally leads us to reason number 2.

2. Cost Effective (’cause it’s free!) :-

Well the section header pretty much says it all. You can’t get much more cost effective than “free,” and all of these Social Media Marketing venues are just that. Free as the air you breathe ~ which, by the way, is how many viruses spread.

3. Wherein a Virus can be Your Business’s Best Friend :-

Remember the “water-cooler” metaphor above? Years ago, in the traditional brick and mortar model of business, the water-cooler was the place where employees would gather to socialize during breaks, exchanging pleasantries and information, introducing the “new guy” to the old guard, telling jokes and showing off pictures of their pets or the new baby.

Long after the physical water-cooler had been replaced by bottled water, “hanging around the water-cooler” remained a metaphor for the casual meetings and conversations that took place among people in the physical spaces of a business environment. Whatever the place, the close physical proximity inherent to “hanging around the water-cooler,” made it equally easy to pass along a cold or flu bug with the jokes and those pictures of your little ones.

As it is in the physical world, so is it in the virtual, and it is in this way, especially, that Social Media Marketing is effective. Facebook is an especially good example of the virtual “water-cooler” inasmuch as people “meet” there and exchange information (including jokes and pictures of the fam) and provide the perfect growth environment for spreading a “virus” in the form of word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s little wonder, then, that adopting Social Media Marketing is a good idea for your small business. And it’s kind of comforting to some of us, after all, that even here, in the virtual business world, we can find in these new fangled technologies an echo of tradition and a sense of continuity that is familiar and reassuring.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, MySpace was the top social network in the land. Eventually, Facebook took over that role, and has not looked back since. Earlier this year, the company announced that it had over 400 million users, then at its developer conference, Facebook made what could be seen as its biggest announcement ever – the Open Graph. Since then, despite a growing amount of interest and discussion around whether or not people should delete their Facebook profiles, Facebook is reportedly just growing and growing.

Facebook is expected to close in on 500 million users next month, and as this Open Graph continues to grow (which it will – a lot), we may see that number rise faster than ever. Unless – all of this negative publicity the company is presently experiencing actually does catch up with it and people do turn elsewhere.

MySpace is no doubt hoping to gain back some momentum from Facebook’s woes, Twitter is certainly a popular option, and growing itself. Google Buzz is still the new kid on the block, but none of these have captured user attention quite like Facebook, and none of them have found such a brilliant way to infiltrate more and more of users’ time spent online as Facebook has.

Facebook has survived user backlash in the past, and it most likely will again, but privacy stuff really freaks people out, and whether or not blaming Facebook for any privacy issues is justified (it can and has been argued that you are really the one responsible for your online privacy), there are parties rushing to offer alternatives, and you can bet that there will be plenty more.

Facebook has already changed the Internet, and many expect it to turn online advertising on its ear as well. While Facebook users go around liking everything all over the web from a growing number of sites that implement its plugins, they are giving Facebook more and more power for the potential targeting of advertising that is truly targeted at them through things that they really do like.

The Like button is a game changer because all of a sudden you have the whole world wide web of content to “like” not just what’s within your immediate network within Facebook and what you may have taken the time to add to your profile two years ago. It keeps user interests current and enables an infinite amount of interest indication that advertisers would salivate for.

Facebook could challenge Google’s AdSense if they were to release a product for publishers to implement Facebook ads into their sites. And these would be the kinds of ads that users wouldn’t be as quick to ignore. In fact, they might even be welcomed with open arms. An ad that is truly relevant is useful to the consumer. And this gives users more reason to keep “liking”.

It won’t work without the users though. If Facebook loses a lot of users, it won’t be quite as attractive to advertisers, but there is nothing indicating that this will happen, despite all of the commentary out there. Facebook is growing. People have already invested a lot of their time and web presence into Facebook, and it this point Facebook is just making it harder and harder to leave as it gets tied into more elements of users’ complete online experience. A lot of the people who have talked about deleting their FB profiles have even found it too hard to actually go through with it.

You might have Diaspora and others come along and try to open things up, but at this point, can Facebook really be replaced? 500 million users. To put that in perspective, the U.S. Census Bureau has 309,293,729 for the total U.S. population. They’ve got the world at 6,821,567,786. Facebook is hardly slowing so far.

Facebook Account Deletion a Popular Topic Lately

Since Facebook announced its plans to take over the web, there has been a lot of talk about privacy concerns, and about deletion of Facebook profiles. There is also concern about the lack of openness in Facebook’s Open Graph initiative. Others are just bored with the social network. Whatever the reasons, an increasing number of people seem to be interested in deleting their Facebook profiles.

Matt Cutts and other Googlers de-activated their accounts soon after the Open Graph initiative was announced. Remember, you don’t have to delete the account to de-activate it. Facebook makes it very easy to stay. In fact, if you go to delete your account, they will try to guilt you into staying by telling you which of your friends will miss you.

There are apparently (as Danny Sullivan points out) so many people searching for how to delete their accounts, Google is even offering the suggestion “How do I delete my Facebook account?” as a suggestion for a query beginning ‘how do I”:

It would be interesting to know how many people that are figuring out how to delete their profiles are actually going through with it. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, for example, just stood on the “edge of the cliff” before backtracking (though I don’t think he intended to go through with it).

Google Insights for Search data shows a pretty big upswing in Facebook account deletion interest over the last year or two (hat tip: Huffington Post):

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur posted the following video talking about why it’s probalby not the greatest idea to delete your Facebook account:

Loic makes a pretty good point about Facebook’s usefulness as a source of public data, and about how you should basically consider everything you do online to be public, if privacy is your concern. As he notes, even emails can be forwarded.

Still if you choose to stick with Facebook, knowing your privacy settings is a good idea. The New York Times has an interesting diagram of what it calls a “bewildering tangle of options” for managing privacy on Facebook. “To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options,” the publication says.

It will be very interesting to see if a significant amount of people drop Facebook, but at this point, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. One guy recently started an initiative to get people to join him in leaving Facebook. It’s not working out so well so far. Josh Levy pledged, “I will delete my Facebook account but only if 10,000 other Facebook users will do the same.” The deadline is May 31st. So far he has 76 people.

This isn’t like when people started abandoning their MySpace accounts for Facebook. There’s no service here drawing people away. People have a lot invested in their Facebook accounts at this point, and as Facebook becomes integrated more and more into the fabric of the web and popular culture as a whole, many will find it hard to walk away even if they have considered it. Then of course there are the many, many people who simply love Facebook.

Author: Chris Crum

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4 years, you know how popular and widely used Facebook is today.

Just a couple of years ago, you had to relentlessly encourage family and friends to join this social networking website (shortly after others had convinced you to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to online traffic. You can then understand how important Facebook marketing has become for websites everywhere.

It’s Not A Pitch Zone

The most important thing to remember about social media is that it is not a place to blatantly and endlessly pitch your product or service. If you do this, then you will not get any favors from social media users, will get largely ignored and even receive bad reviews.

Social media is actually used for building relationships with potential clients in the market. There are a number of ways you can do this:

• you can post helpful information (links) that helps them solve a problem.

• you can personally chat with them to assist them.

• you can create content addressing the needs of users and post it.

The bottom line is that you want to be seen as genuine and helpful. This way, word can get out that you’re the real deal and before you know it, people will become interested in what you have to provide in terms of products and services.

Of course, the things you share on social networking sites such as Facebook shouldn’t be the nitty gritty stuff that you have to offer. You should share helpful information in the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask and wonder if there’s more. Offering free stuff is great for getting attention too.

How To Market On Facebook

The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As a result, it has developed many ways for users to do this. You are not obliged to use every single one of them, but a combination of them can only improve your Facebook marketing.

Pages

This is probably THE marketing tool out there on Facebook. On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.” It is specifically designed for promoting a business and everything it has to provide. People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do this, they let their friends know that they’ve become a Fan of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time is great.

Of course, it’s all dependent on the content you give out for people to use. You need to show them a reason to become a Fan of your Page as well as a reason for staying on.

Events

Create events to be held at a certain date and time. Depending on your type of business, you can create one for a local or international audience. It can be any one of the following:
• seminar: It should be introductory and free but you could promote a paid one too.

• webinar: A seminar conducted online which anyone in the world can join.

• product/service launch: If you are about to launch a product or service, this is a way to gain attention.

The best part about creating an event on Facebook is that it can go viral, and before you know it, people will be attending your event in droves.

Advertising

Finally, about a year ago, Facebook introduced an advertising service where people can put ads promoting their website or their Facebook Page and they pay per click (PPC) or impression (CPM). It works in a similar way to Google Adwords.

You can target your ads to certain geographical locations but in addition, given the nature of Facebook, you can attach your ads to social actions. For example, if you were a wedding photographer and wanted to promote your services, your ads could be set up to appear only to females between the ages of 24 and 30 and whose relationship statuses indicate they are engaged.

It must be noted, however, that Facebook Advertising is still in beta mode which means that it will only improve in the near future.

Embrace Facebook

If you want to market your website online, you would be absolutely nuts not to use Facebook marketing as one of your key strategies. Just be careful not to get caught up in it too much because it can become a very time consuming activity.

Author: Martin Sejas

Microsoft has added a new social sharing feature to Bing Shopping, which lets people share products with members of their social circle via Facebook, Twitter, or email. “Folks can now ask for input before they make that important purchase,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews.

“A lot of us don’t shop alone. Going to the mall is often a social thing, so why should shopping online be any different? 75% of shoppers seek advice from others even when shopping online and now Bing shoppers can too!” the Bing team says.

http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/bing-social.jpg

Bing says it expects people to use the feature to get feedback from their friends not only on pricing, but about things like if an article of clothing would “look good on them” or if there is a better model for a product, etc.

Bing has had sharing features for different kinds of results like news and entertainment for a while, but share features for shopping make could in fact make online shopping a little bit more like going out with friends or accessing a physically unavailable friend whose opinion you value.

I’m a little surprised they didn’t incorporate the Facebook Like Button into this feature, but at least they still respect the fact that people still like more private methods of sharing like email.

It’s been nearly a week since Facebook rocked the world with its Open Graph announcements, and many of us are still wrapping our heads around all of the implications they have. I don’t think there’s any dispute that it’s a huge move, and that it’s important to pay attention to from a business perspective, but just what it means for businesses is still up in the air in some regards. Like Facebook itself, or even social media in general, we’re going to see more benefits (and possibly negatives) as time goes on, and more sites and applications harness the power of said Open Graph.

As those wheels turn in our heads, there is plenty of discussion already happening around the subject – not just the Open Graph and the issues related to it (open web ramifications, privacy, etc), but how we can indeed take advantage of it.

Traffic

In a recent article we talked about why Facebook’s Open Graph and particularly its social plug-ins will be good to drive traffic. It’s pretty straightforward. The like and recommendation buttons are essentially different versions of the share buttons that people have been using to drive traffic for quite some time. The main difference is that instead of only showing up in the news feed only disappear shortly thereafter, they will remain on the user’s profile page for people to see in the future – a fixed link to your content.

Search/SEO

Search Engine Land contributing editor Greg Sterling makes some interesting points about the search implications of the whole thing:

However, the vision here is a network of discovery tools and information that operate higher up in the funnel than search: what are my friends doing, where are they eating, what do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search. But it does represent an alternative way in many cases to discover information.

Yet the mountains of data that Facebook will gain could improve Facebook search results and potentially the coming, new and improved Bing integration. At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

Nobody’s saying Facebook is poised to replace Google, but the whole thing falls inline with the diversification of search we’ve been talking about a lot lately. Search is getting more diversified, meaning that people are using more and more applications to find the information they’re looking for. Facebook obviously plays a huge role in this. Also consider that Facebook’s search market share has been on the rise, and it stands to reason that will continue as more and more data becomes available as this Open Graph expands.

Local

Assuming that every business rushes to get like/recommend buttons from Facebook in the way that they would rush to claim a listing in Google’s Local Business Center (Now named Google Places), Facebook may become a very valuable place to find out the best businesses to go to for any given category.

As Sterling says on his Screenwerk blog, “It could do nothing in particular or it could build the single most effective local directory and search site that exists. This data will be more valuable than anything Google has or any individual local publisher-partner possesses. That includes Yelp, YPG or anyone else that joins the Open Graph and implements these new Facebook platform tools.”

This is mostly forward thinking, and we don’t know what Facebook is going to do. It’s definitely something to keep eye on. Either way, local businesses are likely to attract fans from their areas with more friends from that area, who may in turn pass it to their friends in the area. Facebook has already been a great marketing tool for local businesses, and the Open Graph will only help in that regard.

Reputation

Facebook’s latest changes have plenty of implications for reputation management. Likes and recommendations are potentially great for building a good reputation, but even while there is no dislike button (at least yet), a lack of likes/recommendations may reflect poorly on your brand, particularly when your competition is getting all kinds of love from Facebook users.

On the other side of things, you may want to be careful what you like and recommend yourself. Wording of likes and recommendations can come off as inappropriate, but the bigger issue may be liking and recommending stuff that that paints you in a non-professional light. Depending on what you do and the image you are trying to portray, this may or many not be a problem, but for those who wish to be careful about how others perceive them, this is something to think about.

Author: Chris Crum

Facebook gave the web a lot to chew on with the announcements it made at its F8 developer conference this week. Essentially, it comes down to Facebook consuming/connecting more of the web. For more about the announcements, read this. Now it’s time to think about what it all means for businesses, and fortunately, it probably means good things. Mike Lazerow, CEO of BuddyMedia, a social marketing company that helps develop Facebook pages for about 200 brands, such as ABC, American Express, J. Crew, NHL, Playboy, Mattel, Geico, Samsung, and many more big names, shared some commentary about Facebook’s news with WebProNews.

When you look at just the announcement of Facebook’s social plugins, you can already see some obvious benefits. Facebook has over 400 million users (probably well over that by now), and by including these plugins on your site, you’re providing a direct link for them to share your content with their friends, or simply to share their fondness of your brand, and this information will not not only go to Facebook itself, but has the potential to appear in other places on the web that are part of Facebook’s “Open Graph” (see this Yelp/UrbanSpoon example). Facebook has also changed the “become a fan” button on Pages to “like”. Now consider Lazerow’s points:

- “The shift from ‘Become a Fan’ to ‘Like’ will decrease the friction and perceived user commitment to connecting with a brand as a fan. Every time a consumer will click ‘Like’ on a third-party website, that information will be published back to the user’s Facebook news feed and profile and will appear in search results.”

- “The common Facebook user has an average of 150 friends and each ‘Like’ will increase a brand’s exposure to the friends of that user, ultimately increasing the number of connections the brand has.”

- “The social plug-ins Facebook launched will infuse third-party websites with the personalized social context and social functionality of Facebook, such as commenting, liking, sharing and posting. For the first time, news feeds of social activity will live not just on Facebook, but will be extended to third-party websites.”

- “Facebook and Zynga [the company behind Farmville and Mafia Wars] have shown us that users like to see what their friends are doing. By surfacing the ‘friend’ information on their own websites, brands will be able to make their properties more engaging and increase usage.”

A representative for Appssavvy, a direct sales team for the social media space, tells WebProNews Facebook’s announcement “changes everything,” and that “change is good.”

“Facebook isn’t just a destination or platform moving forward, it truly is becoming a provider of social communication tools for the entire Web,” the company says. “Facebook is going to make the entire Web social, thus a social Web means an entirely different way of thinking about advertising and marketing.”

As of right now, Facebook has 8 Social Plugins to choose from, but Facebook says the “like” button is the most important.

The average Facebook user is going to be incredibly used to seeing these like buttons all over the web, and they’re not going to be shy about clicking them for items and brand that they actually do like. Non Facebook users are going to see them and get accustomed to seeing them on a lot of their favorite sites, and this may lead some of them to eventually join Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his keynote, though laughing as he said it,the people who aren’t on Facebook “probably will be soon.”

There have already been tremendous opportunities for businesses with Facebook, but now that much of the web, for all intents and purposes, is becoming part of Facebook. As Scribd CEO Trip Adler told me during a phone call this week, people are likely going to begin sharing things passively, as opposed to actively in many cases. People are not going to think twice about “liking” a piece of content that they genuinely like. Then all of their friends can see it, possibly check it out, and possibly “like” it themselves, and pass it on to their friends. It not only provides a means for word-of-mouth, it will drive it. That will in turn drive traffic.

It’s worth noting that there is only a “like” button and not a “dislike” button. That means all word-of-mouth that spreads from it will be positive. It’s also worth noting that you will have to give people something actually worth liking for any of this to be effective.