For those of you not familiar with it, BranchOut, in essence, is a networking application that uses information from your Facebook friends that are already on the application to help make introductions to others in companies that you might be interested in. Since it’s built on top of Facebook, BranchOut is sitting on top of a potential gold mine of professional connections, utilizing the site’s extensive user base. This is what the developers of BranchOut foresaw and this is why this late bloomer is often considered a threat to LinkedIn. Add to the fact that people spend more time on Facebook than anywhere else, so it makes more sense for some people to use BranchOut rather than LinkedIn.

BranchOut’s sales pitch is “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know!” You build your network on your connections and the connections of your connections. If you build your system through your group of friends, then you can expand that to access your friends’ network and their employers as well. Through the system you create, you can endorse people, provide references, post notices, follow companies, and even start your own job board as well. The best thing about BranchOut is that your profile automatically mirrors the information you already have in your Facebook profile such as work history, job positions you held, and even former and current employers, so building your professional profile is a breeze.

Building a network is easy: add your friends, then your friends will add their friends; and you can then add the friends of your friends, and so on. You will see your network grow from a few people to a tens or hundreds of people in no time! Since almost everyone is on Facebook, by establishing a professional presence on BranchOut, you clearly have an edge due to the number of users already on the site. If used intelligently, the potential is there get inside connections to jobs and sales leads that you can never easily find elsewhere.

That being said, does BranchOut really compete with LinkedIn? In social media marketing, I teach my clients that everyone has their own preferred social network, and they use it in their own particular way. For that reason, while these communities don’t really compete with each other (unless you look at ad revenue competition from their owners), I believe BranchOut is a natural complement for those who want to use social media for professional networking:

• Perhaps someone is on LinkedIn but spends more time on Facebook, where you might be able to access them easier through your BranchOut network
• Many of your casual friends might not be on LinkedIn. If they are on Facebook and in BranchOut, you can now get access to a very personal network of invaluable connections that might not appear as 2nd degree connections on LinkedIn.
• Many younger professionals are intimidated by LinkedIn but very active on Facebook. Since the trend is that they are also becoming “friends” with their family, you just never know where their network might lead you

Many others in the blogosphere are more bullish about BranchOut:

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, stated that BranchOut allowed him to access different companies and find out who among his network of friends works with whom at a particular company. He also added that he would definitely post jobs at BranchOut. Others have said that while LinkedIn has long been the preferred choice for recruiters and job seekers, BranchOut’s social approach might start to usurp LinkedIn’s dominance. The friend-of-a-friend mechanic also makes introductions and personal recommendation between job hunters and job posters easier. In addition, a few commenters in this Quora thread have high hopes for BranchOut. One in particular said that while Facebook has richer content versus LinkedIn since it’s more fun to use. Facebook also reveals a side of a person that’s different from what he or she shows in a professional setting.

LinkedIn research indicates that 85% of employers admit that a positive online reputation influences their decision to hire a potential employee. You can use this to your advantage on Facebook and expand your professional network by using BranchOut. The best part is you can use both of these services together to grow your connections professionally, letting your reach out to more professional opportunities.

There is no competition between BranchOut and LinkedIn: they only complement each other.

Have you used BranchOut? What has your experience been?

But finally putting an end to the saga and perhaps effectively avoiding any onerous sanctions, Facebook reached a settlement with the FTC last week. The social network essentially agreed to the FTC’s terms of practicing transparency in implementing its privacy policies in order to protect the users’ personal information and interests.

Facebook and the alleged privacy breaches

It can be recalled that the Facebook issue on privacy started when changes to the privacy settings made by the company resulted in user data becoming more public, without the consent or knowledge of the concerned individual. People may freely share their personal information to social media sites but such action is made with the understanding that said information will only be accessible by those within the individual’s network. That’s not what happened with Facebook.

Advertisers and third-party sites reportedly got hold of relevant information of anyone who clicked on an ad on his or her FB page. Users also reported of how images and videos already deleted from one’s account continued to be accessible. But what earned the ire of more people was how the newly-implemented privacy settings created havoc even in people’s personal lives. Case in point: a man who shopped for an engagement ring online lost his chance to do a romantic proposal, reportedly thanks to Facebook publicizing this information. Can we say spoilsport?

Terms of the FTC deal

Hopefully, there will no longer be any of these surprises (or non-surprises for that matter) once the terms of the FTC deal are implemented. The settlement is still pending confirmation from a US Court but the general details have been released already. Among the requirements issued by the FTC was that Facebook submit itself to government-initiated privacy audits every other year for the next twenty years. In addition, the network also needs to get users’ permission before any changes in the privacy settings can be made.

Judging from these scant details revealed, Facebook will no longer have to undo the things done in the past. Instead, the focus of the settlement is on what the company needs to do moving forward.

What this means for Facebook users and advertisers

If we are to assume that there is some truth to the reports that Facebook was sharing users’ information to third-party advertisers, then this group benefited from the company’s actions even while the mass consumer base was up in arms regarding their loss of privacy. But with the Federal Trade Commission firmly putting its foot down on the so-called deceptive practices, FB needs to make a choice: users or advertisers.

Now this doesn’t have to sound so ominous for those using Facebook and social media for business. The fact is, a plethora of businesses have successfully launched advertising campaigns through the social media network without causing a ruckus in the FB community. This is because users can still opt to use any app, like any page, or join any group that interests them. And any one of these “applications” can ask for additional information – information that the user would be only be too willing to share because this is a choice he or she consciously made. On the other hand, if an advertiser makes use of the user data given to it by Facebook or any other social media platform, the information is not as relevant because it did not come directly from the user and hence, any overtures made by the third-party site may be met with rejection if not outright resentment.

The conclusion of this case ushers in a three-way win situation: for the FTC since it was able to lay down its terms, for Facebook since it gets to keep its users, and the users themselves, who can expect better privacy policies.

While stopping short of making a direct admission on the privacy allegations, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement, did concede that they’ve “made a bunch of mistakes,” adding however, that “Facebook had already proactively addressed many of the concerns the FTC raised,” even before reaching an agreement with the federal agency.

Does the FTC settlement make you feel better that Facebook will deal with privacy issues? As a business, do you see this ruling changing the way you will conduct business on Facebook?

Undoubtedly, the history of how Mark Zuckerberg started the biggest social network in the world is already familiar to you. Zuckerberg was commissioned to create a social network called Harvard Connections but delayed the project while pursuing the creation of another site, thefacebook.com. Whether or not he copied the idea is up to the courts, but what we do know is that the growth of the site was phenomenal, getting between 1,200 to 1,500 new users in the first 24 hours.

Starting at Harvard, Facebook quickly branched out to other universities like Columbia and Stanford. It then soon was expanded to cover many of the most prominent colleges in the US, Canada and even in the UK. After a final rollout to employees of big name companies like Apple and Microsoft, other universities in Australia and New Zealand and to high school students, Facebook was finally introduced to the world.

Fast forward to today: Facebook has over 750 million users and as of June 2011, is the second most visited .com site after Google. It’s way beyond a social network as well, becoming a gaming platform, marketplace, messaging hub, photo hosting site and more. And now every business is trying to figure out how to increase Facebook fans.

Twitter

Crazy as it sounds, Twitter started out as a hack on top of AOL Instant Messenger that let Jack Dorsey view status updates on his RIM pager. It was too early for the idea though since mobile devices were still quite scarce and expensive at the time.

From humble dispatch software beginnings, Dorsey was starting to piece together a way to expand the service and add instant messaging and text messaging to the mix. In 2006, he collaborated with Evan Williams and Biz Stone to create a prototype for internal use within William’s company, Odeo. After a few short months, Twitter was eventually formally spun off into its own company.

It’s first growth spurt came during the 2007 SXSW festival, where live tweets were broadcast on two distinctly located plasma screens. From 400,000 tweets per quarter in 2007, Twitter now sends 230 million tweets per day and has 100 million active users around the globe. It has also spawned an ecosystem of hundreds of Twitter apps and tools.

LinkedIn

To start a professional networking site, you have to begin with a few professionals. After working for Apple and PayPal and getting a generous payout from the latter’s sale to eBay, Reid Hoffman was now ready to start his own company. After a brainstorming session with a few friends on his couch, he soon gathered a team of 13 people to start building and promoting his site, LinkedIn.

It was tough going at first but the viral growth soon kicked in and eventually Hoffman was able to monetize the site through advertising, job listings and subscriptions. After a few successful years, LinkedIn finally went for an IPO in January 2011. As of September 2011, the company is now valued at $8.8 million, one of the most successful public offerings in the post bubble era. LinkedIn has also now established itself as the hub for B2B social media marketing.

WordPress

Blogging has become almost synonymous with WordPress. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked WordPress from b2, one of the more popular blog publishing platforms at the time. It grew out of concerns that b2, also known as Cafelog, suddenly stopped getting updates and its main developer fell off the grid somehow. WordPress was built from the GPL code of b2 and released to the world in 2003.

Since then, it’s grown quite a lot winning several Open Source awards across the years and becoming the blogging platform of choice for many companies and brands. Mullenweg himself has gone on to create other successful projects through his company Automattic, such as After the Deadline which aims to bring spell checking to every site on the web and Gravatar, a centralized avatar repository used by many of the top blogs in the world. WordPress is what runs this website and has also spawned an ecosystem that has fostered thousands of WordPress plugins.

Tumblr

David Karp started Tumblr in 2007. When Karp was 19, he found out about a new form of blogging called tumblelogging, a shorter form of posting thoughts to the internet. He soon launched his own site on November 1st, filling the niche between actual blogging and tweeting.

The site has grown quite well to 3 million users strong, boasting an 85 percent retention rate due to its pristine yet customizable interface. Tumblr is now home to over 28 million blogs and more than 10 billion posts. Who would have thought?

Foursquare

Your favorite mayor-ousting service began as a thesis project by Dennis Crowley at NYU. After gaining some buzz as a unique SMS-based location service, the precursor to Foursquare and its technology was bought by Google in 2005. He started collaborated with Naveen Selvadurai in 2008 and soon launched a new location-based app in the popular South by Southwest (SXSW) festival the next year. Dubbed Foursquare, it combined a location pinging services with a badge scoring system that made it a huge hit in the event.

It kept on growing, churning out an API so that other developers could build upon its location discovery service. Foursquare now has 10 million users scattered all over the world with 750 million check-ins under its belt. There’s even a holiday named after it; April 16 is dubbed Foursquare Day. Although the personal ROI of using Foursquare is debatable, the future for location-based services from a marketing perspective is promising.

StumbleUpon

Click a button, find a cool site. That was the basic premise for this service built by friends Geoff Smith, Garrett Camp and Justin LaFrance in 2001. It started as an add-on for Firefox, one of the first actually, and as people adopted the new browser, StumbleUpon grew with it. It also spread via word-of-mouth and its popularity eventually led it to being bought by eBay in 2007.

Feeling that the site was growing beyond what eBay could offer, one of the founders set out to buy the company back in 2009. It was a long and arduous time but in April 2009, StumbleUpon became independent once more. The site has done quite well ever since, boasting 1 billion stumbles (or page recommendations for your non-Stumblers) per month. If you haven’t tried it yet, there are many reasons why you should become a StumbleUpon user.

Empire Avenue

What’s this? Using your social media activity to increase your stock price? This could only happen on the magical website that is Empire Avenue. This social stock market was created by Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana, Dr. Michael Mannion and Niall Brown as a sort of virtual currency, tracking your social value on the web.

It was the culmination of a round of drinks in 2008 in Montreal. Gathering some of the best experts in gaming, business and math, they created a site that takes an algorithmic analysis of networks you are part of and translating that into economic terms like your share price. Once an invite-only site, it’s now open to the public and free to play.

If you’ve been hanging around social networks the past few months, you’ll notice people playing Empire Avenue and building up their “social capital” through it. While the site doesn’t reveal statistics about itself, it did raise a cool $1.2 million in financing recently, which means we will be seeing a whole lot more of Empire Avenue soon. And, yes, Empire Avenue is important to social media marketers.

Did you learn anything new here by looking at the history of these popular social media websites? Any other tidbits you’d like to add? Please share!

According to Facebook, the site has more than 500 million users! And, people spend more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook each month!  Still think it’s a site that’s just for fun?

Here’s how it can work for you – the more fans you have, the more people that are seeing your products, the more people that are visiting your website, and the more people that are spending their money with you.

So, how do you get more fans?  Follow these 4 tips:1. Integrate Facebook into your marketing scheme

Add a button on your website, a link in your email signature, and even a small notation on your company letterhead and business cards.  Make it easy for people to find your Facebook page and become a fan of it. In today’s world, giving out your company’s Facebook information can be just as important as giving out your phone number of email address. If you are running an ecommerce site, many shopping carts such as Ecommerce Templates allow you to easily integrate Facebook like buttons on your product pages.

2. Make your page relevant and interesting

The need for quality, solid information doesn’t stop just because you’re on Facebook.  People need a reason to become your fan. A page that never changes, or a page that is nothing but sales hype is not going to do it.  Instead, people are going to want to see new updates and new developments.  In fact, you can even put exclusive content on there, so that people have to be your fan to get it!\

3. Use freebies to your advantage

Free stuff is a great motivator! Giving everyone who becomes your fan a coupon is a great way to entice more fans.  Or, enter all of your new fans in a contest, and give the winner a gift certificate.  If people think they’ll get something out of it, they’ll be more likely to become your fan.

4. Ask your list

If you already have a list of email subscribers, you are one step ahead.  Obviously, these people like you, your business, and your approach, so they’re the perfect choice to become your Facebook fans – and encourage their friends to become your fans!  All it takes is a quick email to your list, letting them know that you’ve launched a page, and you’d like them to spread the word. Chances are, a lot of them will.

Today’s blog post was written by my guest Kirsty LaVier, who is editor for Shopping Cart Reviews, the leading shopping cart software information website.

You may wonder why I go through the trouble of compiling and writing these posts, but the answer is simple: Our industry is changing so fast and there are so many blog posts and tweets out there that I want to make sure to provide a guideline to my readers, and myself, of those must-read articles that will help everybody keep pace or get up-to-speed in learning about the latest thinking surrounding any given social media platform.  The end-of-the-year is the perfect time to do this.

My algorithm for determining these blog posts is the same as previous ones, and once again I have tried my best to organize them into categories for you.  Although I didn’t write as many posts about this site as I did about Twitter and LinkedIn, where appropriate I will introduce my own writings as well in case you missed them.

Personal Profile Tips and Tricks

10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks by Amy-Mae Elliott [4,225]

Jazz up your profile through a few nifty tricks.  Read about how to tag people in updates, pre-schedule posts with Later Bro, turn your status updates into a tag cloud, and more.

20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know from Hongkiat [3,302]

Some great tips here on getting more out of Facebook from outside of the social platform from creating friend collages to removing Facebook advertisements from your profile view.

How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses by Michael Arrington [1,466]

If you’ve ever wanted to get the contact details of your FB friends, now you can.  There are quite a few gems in the comments as well, like using those “missing” contacts to increase your LinkedIn network and syncing this with your Google Contacts and phone address book for a “holistic” address book.

How To Recreate That Facebook Profile Picture Hack by Alexia Tsotsis [1,302]

Jealous of the new “sliced” profile pics some people have been showing off at the top of their new professional profile?  You can have that on your profile as well through a few Photoshop steps introduced in this post.

The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now by Sarah Perez [1,188]

If you care about privacy at all, you only need to take 5 minutes to get your profile info in order and keep it away from snooping eyes.  A classic post from ReadWriteWeb which is still relevant today and was featured in the New York Times when first published earlier this year.

I wrote a post about the increasing amount of spam you might be receiving and how to deal with it here: Understanding Those Mysterious FB Spam Messages You May Be Receiving [11]

General Marketing

25 Tips for Killer Facebook Marketing by Justin Stravarius [533]

This is a great article from Appstorm that should get you started thinking about how to use Facebook above and beyond merely launching a Page.  It’s crammed with tips from snagging a vanity URL to posting user experiences, all of which will help get your business noticed socially.

I published two posts this year that go beyond the genre of simply developing a Page and instead thinking outside of the box for marketing on this social media site:

Growing Your Business…One FB Friend at a Time [14]

Farmers Insurance Social Media Marketing Case Study: Utilizing FarmVille for FB Brand Awareness [32]

Page Design & Development

HOW TO: Build a Facebook Landing Page for Your Business by Matt Silverman [2,570]

Don’t let your company’s Page look like everyone else’s.  Crank up the customization a notch by adding a tab (or three) using FBML.  Mashable contributes a short but informative article on how to do so with little effort.

Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources by Julia May [2.381]

This is probably one of the most definitive guides out there of best practices in designing visually stunning and effective Fan Pages from our friends at Smashing Magazine.  The great looking landing tabs that are showcased here are truly inspiring.

The 12 Best Ways To Customize Your Facebook Pages by Orli Yakuel [1,768]

You don’t have to hack it out on your own to get a custom Page operating. Check out this selection of web services that will help you edit to impress.

How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages by Orli Yakuel [1,687]

This Techcrunch article bundles up a lot of great advice on how to grab the attention of your FB fans and visitors. Unsurprisingly, it’s all about great content, but it’s the way in which you develop your Page that can foster this.

How to Customize Your Facebook Page Using Static FBML by Nick Shin [885]

Another in depth look on how to utilize Static FBML in personalizing your Page, this time coming from Social Media Examiner.  Dig into this for a little more detailed look at tips like embedding YouTube videos and creating images with clickable links for your Page.

10 Tips & Tricks For Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page by Michael Vreeken [787]

More tips on tricks on FBML programming on your Page to include elements such as hiding content from non-fans, inserting Flash content, and adding a “Invite Your Friends” box.

Creating a custom facebook fan page from Webdigi [135]

The power of Static FBML is showcased by this short tutorial for more advanced developers, showing how to do things in your Page such as create a carousel, submit a web form, and even customize a dialogue box.

7 FBML examples to rock your Facebook fan page from Webdistortion [129]

This top blog post contains even more FBML code samples to help make your Page a true marketing powerhouse, from randomizing marketing messages (great for experimenting with new ideas) to adding sharing buttons to make it more viral.

Page Applications

Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page by Mari Smith [842]

Stop the press!!!  This is the definitive post, just published two days ago, of the best Page applications that are out there.  And it was written by Mari Smith.  Enough said.

Page Analytics

Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages from Webdigi [2,923]

Google Analytics shouldn’t just be about analyzing your main website anymore.  The folks over at Webdigi were crafty enough to devise a solution that lets you use Google’s flagship web analysis tool to analyze activity on your Page on the most popular social network in the world.

How to Add Google Analytics to Your Facebook Fan Page by Mariam John [2,266]

Another tutorial of the same with a little more hand-holding and images published by Social Media Examiner but still based on Webdigi’s code.

Page Engagement

21 Creative Ways To Increase Your Facebook Fanbase by Mari Smith  [3,312]

Funnel people into your Page using all the social muscle you can muster through these tips.  Both traditional and new media techniques are listed here, so there are no excuses for saying you can’t deploy any of these techniques.

5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From by Matt Silverman [1,664]

Ranging from the simple to the full-on website experience, Mashable presents ideas from some of the most engaged landing pages on FB. If you’ve been stumped on what approach you should take, this should kick start your idea machine.

Altimeter Report: The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing by Jeremiah Owyang [1,355]

While not a how-to per se, this report should still be able to give you an idea on what works vis a vis engagement in the realm of Pages.  Based on excellent research from Jeremiah Owyang and the thought leaders at Altimeter Group, this report includes an analysis of 30 brands to learn from.

How to Better Engage Facebook Fan Page ‘Fans’ by Mari Smith [1,245]

Getting noticed online is primarily about two things: content and conversations.  This post shares a lot of insight on how to succeed using those two things using a plethora of examples.  Another definitive post from Mari Smith.

How We Got To 40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days by Dennis Yu [151]

A step-by-step analytical case study of how one company grew their Fan base by over 40,000 in 4 days primarily through a clever Facebook Ad campaign.

Marketing Analysis

When Are Facebook Users Most Active? [STUDY] by Christina Warren [4,030]

Facebook is touted by some as “now” media – meaning you need to be engaging users at the same time they are on the site for it to be effective.  Check out when you should be posting to get the best results through this Mashable analysis.

The Biggest Brands on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC] by Shane Snow [2,902]

A very interesting infographic about the biggest brands on FB.  Amazingly, some of the brands you see most often on TV and on billboards aren’t in the list.  Check out how many Likes you need to be counted on top.

What “Like” Buttons Mean for Web Traffic [STATS] by Jolie O’Dell [2,385]

How exactly has the ubiquitous thumbs-up icon been affecting Internet traffic? Here’s a rundown of the numbers straight from the source.

World Map Of Social Networks Shows Facebook’s Ever-Increasing Dominance by Robin Wauters [2,275]

The big blue social machine is slowly toppling off other networks as shown in this series of maps from June, 2009 to December, 2010.  Will 2011 see the entire world converted into FBdom?

Facebook directs more online users than Google by Benny Evangelista [2,267]

Although this article was written back in February, it is still relevant for marketers to understand the importance that a Facebook presence has attached to it not just for engagement but also for leading potential customers to your website.

Facebook News Feed Settings: Random or Not, Biggest Secrets Revealed by Thomas E. Weber  [1,808]

Appearing in the News Feed of all of your Fans is a marketer’s dream but rarely happens in reality.  Read more about how to accomplish this by discovering FB’s biggest secrets as to how they determine what gets placed into who’s News Feed through one website’s experiment.

How Much Is a Facebook Fan Really Worth? by Mathew Ingram [1,718]

The answer? $136.38, more or less.  A controversial study that is required reading for any social media marketer.

Facebook, By The Numbers by Alexia Tsotsis [1,064]

The history of the world’s favorite social destination featured in this definitive infographic which has almost everything you’ve wanted to know about the site and more.

You may also want to check out my analysis of FB Places: Facebook Places Analysis: 3 Reasons Why FB Will Continue to Be Your Aggregator of Social Information [24].

If I missed any other useful FB posts from 2010, please place a link together with your comment and share the top posts and your opinion with us.  Thanks!

Recent events, however, may hint at the upcoming battle for business between the two platforms in 2011.

As companies increase their social media marketing budgets to encompass almost 20% of their entire marketing budget, and with online advertising comprising another 15% of marketing budgets, the two social media sites are vying for a potential 1/3 of marketing budgets over the next few years.  Both websites have ad platforms: FB Ads vs. Direct Ads.  But Facebook has companies and LinkedIn has professionals.  If FB can get the professional demographic to better embrace its platform, it will lead to an even greater dominance worldwide and higher advertising revenues.  If LI can get companies to establish a presence similar to like they have on FB Pages, they can start to bring more marketing budgets away from Facebook and over to LinkedIn.  Now, each are vying for what the other has with their latest new functionality.

The battle heated up when LinkedIn announced their new enhanced Company Pages on November 1.  The above image is actually a screenshot direct from LI which looks slightly similar to a FB Page ad, only the “Like” is replaced with a “Recommend” button.  Of course, above and beyond recommending a business, the LinkedIn Follow Company feature already allowed you to “Like” a company by following it.  Over time, those follower numbers have added up to the point where a company like HP has amassed over 160,000 followers.  That’s only a little less than the 170,000 fans HP’s FB Page has.  For a site that has less than 1/5 the user numbers that Facebook has, LinkedIn still has relevance to many businesses because of its overwhelming professional demographic.

When compared to FB Pages, the LI Company featured only a slightly customizable page.  The new enhancements allowed interaction from users for the first time, allowing them to now “Recommend” company products and services, add comments to their recommendations, and see who in their network made what company recommendations just as Facebook users can see which of their friends “Like” a page.  According to the LI blog post, the functionality should be available by now to all companies who have their own LI Company Page.

If you don’t think that LI Company Pages are vying for the marketing budget that may be going to Facebook Pages, check out this quote from the same Linkedn blog post from HP’s CMO:

“LinkedIn is a pioneer in harnessing the power of social media and brands can benefit tremendously from participating in this networking of leading professionals.”

With LinkedIn vying for the attention of companies creating Pages for their companies, Facebook came back with a different approach: Bring the professional demographic from LinkedIn over to Facebook.  One month after announcing the new LI Company Pages enhancements, Facebook announced the arrival of its new personal profiles.  Not only does the new profile provide a professional headline summary for which LinkedIn has always had, it also gives you a chance to better show off your work experience by entering the various projects you have worked on and tagging the people that you worked together with.  The mass media immediately announced that Facebook was going after the professional demographic, and they are probably right.

In fact, Facebook already has the professional demographic because almost 40% of FB users in the United States are over 35 years old.  If half of LinkedIn’s users are from the United States, the calculations would show that Facebook and LinkedIn probably have almost the same number of professional members.  The problem is that with the professional demographic, LinkedIn is a closed and trusted place to network while many of the older generations who I know that are on Facebook don’t see it as a valuable use of their time.  If Facebook can get more people to use it in a more “professional” way, they can start to steal the mindshare away from the professional demographic, which will only lead to greater engagement and even higher advertising revenues for them.

While FB Pages still reign dominant over LI Company Pages for the time being, LinkedIn just last week announced new analytics for your Company Page which are similar to Facebook Insights as well as an Admin Panel similar to what Facebook has to allow for easy company management of the page.  This was accompanied by announcement of a new widget that can now be installed on any website to allow anyone to “Recommend” your products and services on LinkedIn from anywhere.

With Company Page functionality on the increase, LinkedIn is ready to unleash their next weapon for business onto Facebook: Public LI Groups.  The precursor for this was to open up LI Groups and make it easier to share content from the outside world into the professional networking platform via the new official LinkedIn Share Button, which can now be easily embedded into websites similar to Twitter’s ReTweet and the FB Share button.  This one-ups the FB Share button in that it allows you to share website content to your profile as well as directly to LI Groups.  Furthermore, realizing the problem that many FB Page administrators have with managing their Page efficiently, LinkedIn recently added a host of new Group moderation tools to allow for granular detail of who can post what that simply does not exist on Facebook.

The problem with LI Groups, though, is that they are private worlds: Unless you were a member of that Group you couldn’t see inside it.  The FB Page openness, and its associated potential SEO benefits, attracted companies to create their Pages and send more advertising revenue to Facebook.  But that is going to change with LinkedIn’s pending announcement that both existing Groups have an option to become public ones and that new public-only Groups can be created.  If your company has a FB Page, why wouldn’t you have a Public LI Group to have discussions with professionals and targeted consumers in addition to your LI Company Page?

More importantly, though, the engagement on LI Groups are significant in that there is plenty of room for discussion, not like the small status update boxes that are used on their rival platform.  Furthermore, LI Groups have the ability to send daily and weekly digests which FB Pages lack, which create even more engagement from Group members.  Sure, the largest Group, Linked:HR, has only 345,000+ members while the largest Page, Facebook’s own page, has more than 30,000,000 fans.  However, there are more than twice the number of Groups, almost 800,000 to be exact, compared to 320,000+ Pages.

When all Group Managers have the ability to go public, if only 1/2 of the present groups choose to do so they will soon be flooding the search engines with enough content to rival that of Facebook in due time.  More and more Group discussions will come up in long tail search results, which will bring more traffic to LI and higher membership numbers to Group owners.

LinkedIn has apparently come up with an extremely calculated and strategic plan to study the shortcomings of its mammoth competitor and create a platform that should be as welcome for business as it currently is for the professional.  Every social media marketer, especially those in B2B industries, needs to watch these developments closely going into 2011 and start to take the platform originally for professionals a little more seriously.

What will Zuckerberg’s next move be for business?  And what do you think of the above analysis?  Do you see the events any differently?

I had the opportunity to interview Ryon Harms, the Director of Social Media for Farmers Insurance, and get his input on the significance of this campaign for Farmers as well as what other social media marketers can learn from his experience.  Here’s what I learned from the talk and the campaign itself, which was the brainchild of Marc Zeitlin, Vice President of eBusiness for Farmers.

1.) Any Social Media Campaign Needs to Be Aligned with Your Brand

Farmers Insurance was founded in 1928 by actual farmers who felt they were under-served and paid too much for insurance.  100 years later, Farmers is now serving virtual farmers on FarmVille.  Farmers Insurance came to the conclusion that partnering with Farmville would actually align very nicely with their brand and who they are.  Farmers Insurance has always been seen as a conservative company, and now they wanted to show that they were in touch with their clients, had an amazing internal culture, and cared a great deal about their customers.  Social media was seen as a perfect channel to use to get the word out about who they were.  And the choice of FarmVille was a natural.

2.) You Need to Be Where Your Audience Is

I was confused why Farmers would choose FarmVille, which I always thought of being something that a younger demographic who had no need for insurance were playing.  According to Farmers, though, the largest deomgraphic group playing FarmVille are actually stay-at-home moms.  Since they believe that this population is in charge of a majority of the insurance buying decisions in any given household, FarmVille was a perfect outlet to reach out to their potential customers on.

3.) Be the Pioneer, Not the Follower

Harms mentioned that this was only the first of many social media campaigns, and that social gaming is still something that they will continue to work with.  Farmers, who were late to the social media bandwagon of Facebook and Twitter, see social gaming as becoming a much more popular thing in the future, and they want to be the pioneers here.  No doubt that support from the executive team as well as the efforts of Zeitlin, who did not have a background in social media, to try to do things differently and do something new were instrumental in making Farmers a real pioneer in the space.

4.) Approach Social Gaming as an Opportunity

I was wondering how it was working with Zynga.  Apparently, it was easy for Farmers to work with them and align their strategy with that of Zynga to ensure that Farmers was able to build awareness while respecting the integrity of the game and the people playing it.  Social gaming is an opportunity, like mobile, that are only going to gain in importance, yet so few companies seem to have a strategy on.  Now is the perfect time to approach social gaming as an opportunity.

5.) Compliance Issues for a Regulated Industry?

There are many companies in regulated industries like Farmers who are trying to stay as far away from social media as possible.  It was encouraging to see that Farmers agreed to do this social campaign, yet I wondered if there were any internal departments worrying about potential compliance issues.  According to Harms, FarmVille is a virtual world, so the only compliance issues that Farmers had was actually making sure that they played by the rules of the game!  Even if your company is in a regulated industry, there are things that can be done in social media to help your company build brand awareness.

6.) Social Media Does Not Exist in a Vacuum

Farmers is not putting an airship on FarmVille for the sake of advertising in a virtual world.  They are, in parallel, running a campaign on their Facebook Fan Page which will allow the winners, chosen from those that “Like” their page, to have a ride in the actual Farmers Airship, pictured above, which is apparently the largest flying aircraft in the world.  Gamers on FarmVille will be taken directly to the Farmers Fan Page by clicking on the virtual airship protecting the virtual crops.  By integrating FarmVille and Facebook with their promotional campaign, the result will not only be much greater awareness by those playing Farmville as well as Facebook users in general; it will also have a lasting effect of having a Fan Page with tens of thousands of present customers and future clients that can now be tapped into in the future.

So what have the results been of the campaign so far?  The Facebook sweepstakes started 2 weeks ago, at which time Farmers had 6,500 Facebook fans.  That number last week swelled to 14,000 with the introduction of the sweepstakes.  After the FarmVille campaign started on Monday, that number has jumped to more than 37,500 fans.  That doesn’t necessarily equate to more revenues, but in an industry where Geico has mindshare with their entertaining commercials and Allstate and State Farm have more sales, Farmers has made a statement by setting up shop and allowing their fans quick access to quotations, searching local dealers, and even the ability to ask a question directly on their Fan Page Wall.

Where does Farmers go from here?  “Obviously we want to be number one in social media out of all of the insurance brands,” said Harms, “but more importantly, we want to be considered a leading social brand, a company that would be at the top of the Social Media Brand Engagement Report put out by Altimeter.”

It is refreshing to see a big brand who understands where they are going and where they need to be with their social strategy.

What do you think of this social campaign?

Image courtesy of Flickr / praytino

If mobile and the location-based application are the next biggest thing, instead of reinventing the wheel, Facebook decided intelligently to partner with the leading “check-in” services in Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp to extend their presence with the Places application.  In doing so, they have positioned themselves as the default place to check out where your friends are when you’re outside on the go.  As a result, similarly to extending the Facebook experience to the Web with the Social Graph, they are now extending themselves to location-based services, and in doing so will continue to be a sticky social aggregator.  Here’s my analysis on 3 reasons why this is the case:

1) Places API and Partnerships Extend the Location-Based Social Application

By opening up their APIs as they always do as well as creating partnerships with the leaders in the field of location-based social applications, Facebook continues to position themselves as the aggregator of social information.  I didn’t realize this myself until I started using Places and noticed all of the check-ins that were happening outside of FB on other platforms.  Facebook doesn’t and shouldn’t care whether you use Foursquare, Gowalla, or Yelp to check-in: All of your check-ins on these other platforms will now flow into Places.  Furthermore, with the new Places API, companies like Booyah, the creators of MyTown, are planning to release a new application called InCrowd.  One can only predict that this is just the beginning of companies building upon the Places API.  Why not?  Analysis from a business perspective will clearly show that if you wanted to offer a location-based service, FB is the clear platform to partner with because they potentially give you access to half a billion users.  Not bad, huh?

2) Where are Your Friends?

Recent statistics show that Foursquare and Gowalla have a combined 2 million users.   As with any new Web 2.0 application, the value in the application is only there if a lot of other people are using it.  While a lot of my social media friends are using Foursquare, analysis has proven to me that whenever I check in at a local restaurant here in Orange County, California filled with tens of people I am usually the only one checking in.  Facebook recently hit 500 million members.  Do the math and you’ll come to the conclusion I made: Facebook is where your friends are, not Foursquare, Gowalla, or even Yelp.  Doesn’t it make sense, then, for the largest social media site to aggregate all of these other check-in services so you can truly see where all of your friends are?  You can now see why the partnerships above make sense for each party: Foursquare needs more users for its platform to become mainstream, and Facebook needs active users of location-based mobile social applications.  And, whether we like it or not, we all need Facebook.

3) It’s About Your Friends, Not Places

To further emphasize my point that Facebook is all about your friends, the user interface for Places first shows where your friends are.  I was confused as to how I could go about checking-in from there, until I realized that the “Check-In” button on this initial screen will lead you to the familiar “Places” screen like you have in Foursquare.  It is true in Foursquare that the “default” screen is Friends, but I am always using “Places” first to check-in and then see where my friends are.  The cool thing is that as I write this blog post from the comfort of my home, I can launch the Facebook iPhone application and instantaneously see where all of my friends have checked-in.  Facebook seems to understand that it’s not about the check-in and becoming a “Mayor” but about seeing where your friends are and keeping in touch with them.

Where is all of this analysis going?  Without a doubt, Places will lead to broader acceptance of location-based social applications.  In fact, as predicted, this has already happened: Foursquare has already seen a surge in new signups since Places launched.  And it wouldn’t surprise me if Foursquare actually used the Places API to extend their own platform into the world of FB.  I will personally stick with Foursquare for my actual check-ins while checking up on where others are on Facebook, but one very positive potential from all of this is that maybe people will stop tweeting their Foursquare check-ins and instead realize that all they need to is simply “check-in” to be found on the default social information aggregator of them all: Facebook.

In case you’re still not familiar with Places, here is a video explanation straight from the source:

Where do you think Places is leading us?

Today’s guest blog post about social media strategy for local marketing utilizing Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare comes from someone I met Windmill Networking on My Blog Guest, AJ Wilcox.  I asked AJ to write about the intersection of local Internet marketing and social media strategy, and he surpassed my expectations with this excellent blog post. AJ is the SEO Team Lead over at OrangeSoda, a local Internet marketing firm. He has been in love with Internet marketing for over 3 years, and has overseen over 2,000 SEO accounts. He is married with a 1 year old son and enjoys cars and running.

Your business may be using Twitter, Facebook, or Foursquare to be connected to its customers, but have you considered integrating all three? Each platform has individual strengths that can make your business’s social media strategy more effective, and they have platform integration functions that make it simple.

My expertise is in local, brick-and-mortar businesses, so I’d like to direct my thoughts towards this type of business. As I see it, there are 5 ways to use social media:

• Branding/PR
• Sales channel
• Customer interaction
• Promotions
• Reputation management

Let’s cover each channel in detail and how they can be integrated for the most cohesive strategy.

Branding/PR

You company has a personality that goes along with the brand. You’ve probably contributed to it for as long as you’ve been involved. Social media can be a great way to establish that brand personality.

If your business is the stuffy, “professional” type, then your Facebook profile page should reflect that. Your tweets and status updates should be professional in nature. Everything coming from you is informational and inspires trust and authority. Yes, even tweets can encourage followers to utilize you as a resource. If your company is the fun, personable type, your Facebook page and tweets should follow suit. It’s all about the personality.

Discuss your company goals and strategy with employees interacting with the public through your social media to keep everything on brand. And I’m not really suggesting it. It’s a necessity.

Use social media to establish brand authority by mentioning industry news and showing you are on top of your game. A company that is involved and active in the industry will be a better place to do business than a company that won’t ever evolve.

Sales Channel

Why did you originally start doing social media for your company? My guess is that it was because you thought that somehow you could use it to bolster sales and build your customer base. This is a fantastic use of social media, and it should definitely be used – but be careful not to overuse this channel. Remember that your fans/followers aren’t following you for the pure joy of being advertised to all day long.

Twitter and Facebook are really the keys to this channel. Did you just start selling a new product? Let people in your networks know. I personally wouldn’t let an advertisement tweet or update go out more than once in 5 or so messages. Foursquare will let you put a sticker in your store window to alert customers to the fact that you’re active, so they can get on and connect.

Remember, the wider your social network, the wider your advertising reach. The more of a reason you give potential customers to follow you, the more effective sales channel messages will be when customers arrive.

Customer Interaction

No matter what industry you are in, your customers are becoming more social-media savvy. Your customers will talk about you or to you on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and just about any other platform there is. Being available to respond to your customers’ questions, inquiries, tips, etc. is a great way to build loyalty. Your audience is putting more emphasis on being transparent, available, and savvy. Now is your chance to be there for them. Be real and don’t do automated responses. No one likes dealing with robots.

Think about it. If one of your customers tweets, “This sux, I went to pick up my order and it hadn’t arrived yet,” how about responding to them—immediately—with, “Sorry about your order! Our driver had a truck issue. It should be here at 3:30. We’re sending along a $5 gift card for the inconvenience.”

The customer would be stunned that you were listening and were willing to explain the issue clearly. They may have had a small inconvenience by dropping into the store simply to be turned away empty handed, but now they know it was because the truck was late. Instead of talking about your business as incompetent and uncaring, they leave a comment about your excellent customer service.

Imagine fielding customer service questions like, “How long is that sale going on this week?”, and “how late are you guys open tonight?” Your customers will feel like they are getting personal attention and will be more likely to frequent your establishment.

Promotions

Twitter and Foursquare are fantastic for promotions. Consider doing a coupon, special, or contest with your social network.

Twitter is fantastic for contests and promotions. You can set rules directly related to your tweets, e.g., retweeting your announcement (and thereby invite their network to the promotion) counts as an entry to the contest. That means that every entry to the contest makes their whole network also aware of the promotion. As retweets fly around the twittersphere, thousands of people will end up seeing your promotion, and it’s a great way to build a larger following.

Foursquare is great for in-store promotions. As customers are checking foursquare in your area, a message will pop up saying that someone in their area is offering a special. Upon clicking, they will see whatever special you have set for your establishment. The best part about Foursquare is that the customer is already within walking distance, and any traffic you can build into your store would most likely be traffic that was not planning on visiting your store.

As a business on Foursquare, you also have access to a dashboard to see how often people are checking into your establishment. You also get to see who the Mayor is (the person who checks in to your store most often in the last 60 days), and have an opportunity to reward the mayor with a special offer. The best part of this is that it encourages check-ins by others who want to be the mayor and therefore have to come by more often. Your business profits from the additional traffic clamoring for the mayoral honor.

Reputation Management

It has been said that a disappointed customers will tell 10 people about their awful experience. It is also true that it’s a lot easier to tell more than 10 people over a social media network incredibly effortlessly. Wherever a customer is talking, they will talk about you.

Enter social networks. When your company is being discussed publicly, you have the opportunity to participate in the conversation publicly. Stand up for your business decisions and diffuse angry customers. Remember that the longer a client’s concern goes unaddressed, the more they are going to scream and shout, so address it fast.

There are a wide variety of keyword monitoring tools for Twitter, both free and paid, to help you watch for mentions of your company on Twitter. Be part of the conversation.

Foursquare also allows customers to leave tips to other customers. Watch for negative tips and warnings, and immediately correct the issues that cause negative tips. If you ignore them, they just build up and damage your rep.

Any other social media advice that you can provide for local brick-and-mortar businesses?  Please do share your experiences with us.  And if you’d like to submit a guest blog post on Windmill Networking like AJ did, please contact me!  Thanks!

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I often get asked about whether it makes sense to completely integrate Twitter Tweets with your LinkedIn Status Update, so that every tweet shows up on LinkedIn.  Obviously there is no one correct answer for this as it depends on your objective and LinkedIn Brand.  However, the question brings to mind a greater issue:

How often should you update your social media status on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Your Blog?

Each social media site has its own functionality, demographics, history, and culture.  And you may have one or multiple objectives for using these sites.  I won’t go into detail on how varying objectives may warrant different frequencies in which you update your status on each of the social media channels, but on average I would make the following recommendations:

Twitter

Because there are so many tweets out there (there are more tweets than people now!) and the culture is one that accepts people who tweet a lot (this is explained by the fact that you could tweet a lot and go unnoticed), it is accepted to tweet several times a day.  I tell people, when they start out, to aim for 4 to 5 tweets a day.  I personally aim for 8 to 10, although I rarely achieve this goal.  When I say tweets, I’m talking about sharing some type of relevant and valuable information, not just chit-chat.  I do not preach automating in social media, but if there were one automation tip I recommend, it would be to schedule your tweets in advance with a tool like HootSuite so that they appear spread out throughout the day.

LinkedIn

Before Twitter became as mainstream as it is today, LinkedIn had its own replication of the tweet with its “Status Update.”  A lot of people used to wonder what to use their LinkedIn Status Update for.  Now that LinkedIn is integrated with Twitter, and more LinkedIn members are on Facebook, people get the idea of what they could put on their Linkedin Status Update.  That being said, because LinkedIn doesn’t have the same “Timeline of Tweets” like Twitter or “News Feed” like Facebook, it doesn’t make sense to post more than once a day on LinkedIn.  I personally wouldn’t post anything if I didn’t have anything of value to say that wasn’t aligned with my objective.  Furthermore, if you repeatedly show up multiple times in Network Updates on someone’s Home Page in the same day, it begins to look spammy, that you are trying too hard to “gain mindshare.”  There are other and better ways of doing that on LinkedIn.  And do remember that LinkedIn is also a Professional environment, so some personal tweets and Facebook posting content might not be appropriate here…

Facebook

Facebook is a tough one.  Similar to Twitter, there are so many people on Facebook competing for space on your News Feed that if you don’t post a lot you may not get noticed.  However, I do see a lot of people who only post once a day, and when I have gone over that in the past, I have received word from Facebook friends that I posted too much!  People definitely get most personal on Facebook.  Certainly Twitter is not Facebook, so I personally don’t think that you should be posting every tweet here.  On the other hand, if you have a lot going on, it may make sense to post multiple times in a single day.  If I could compare the frequency of updating your status on Facebook compared with LinkedIn and Twitter, it would look something like this:

LinkedIn Status Updates < Facebook Posts < Twitter Tweets

Blogging

You really need someone to tell you how often to update your blog?  As often as you can, of course!  Seriously speaking, if you are going to blog, I do recommend that you do your best to blog at least one a week.  Consistency is also important, but even if you are not consistent on the days of the week or how many times you post each week, I think you should try to publish one blog post on a weekly basis.  Want to blog more?  You can never blog too often. I dream of having the time to blog on a daily basis…and envy those who do!

On a final note, it is impossible to do all of the above using a tool like Ping.fm or even a client like HootSuite (although they are fantastic products) unless you are really disciplined.  Just as it does not make sense to integrate all of your tweets into your LinkedIn profile, it also doesn’t make sense to overly automate your engagement with others by blasting the same message to all of the various social media platforms simultaneously.  Yes, there may be an occasional post, like a new blog article that you wrote, that it may make sense to post on all platforms at once.  That should be the exception, however, and not the rule.

What do you think?  What are the social media status updates frequency guidelines that you use?  Please comment and share your experiences with us!

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