The new Timeline for Facebook Pages are here. In this post, we’re excited to highlight what you need to know to get started. We’ve listed some of the important new additions and as a way to help to approach your new page, we’ve taken a look at Starbucks Facebook page to demonstrate the new features and different kinds of Facebook updates that work well. Let’s begin!

Social media marketing continued to make significant headway in 2011 and is expected to move full steam ahead in 2012. More specifically, what trends can we expect to see in the coming year? We checked in with five marketing pros who shared their insights with us. Joining us are Sergio Balegno, Shama Kabani, Cindy King, Joe Pulizzi, Mike Volpe and our very own Julie Diaz-Asper

If your business caters predominately to local customers then you know how important it is to gain the attention of people in your immediate vicinity. In this post, we’ll explore ways to be leverage engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Google Places.

While both B2B and B2C businesses use social media marketing, their tactics, goals and objectives differ dramatically. Buy, buy, buy is often the over-arching message for B2C brands using social media. Instead, for B2B businesses social media marketing is seen as an opportunity to demonstrate your know-how and a way to build and strengthen relationships.

Sharing useful content is an important part of a social media marketing strategy. Regardless of whether people follow you on Twitter, like you on Facebook or have you in one of their circles on Google+, you want to make sure you not only share your content but you want to pass along links to posts that speak to you and that you think will speak to your followers and readers as well.

Rules of Engagement 
New study builds the case that focusing on your news feed can get you Facebook engagement and visibility.
The recent Comscore  and Facebook study found that:
“Users are 40 to 150 times more likely to …

It’s official. We’re now in the summer of 2011, past the 4th of July, always a good marker of summer. While you may be settling into a more laid back mode for the next couple of months, the world of social media doesn’t seem to slow down or necessarily recognize the concept of vacation. We’re also at the half-way mark of 2011, which is a good place too to take stock and see how far we’ve come and where we’re going for the second half of the year.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times a week I must hear the question asked, Does Social Media Marketing really work for generating leads and new business? What I’ve learned about social media marketing and seen first hand is that like any other marketing plan a business embarks upon, in order to be effective, social media must be well-planned, targeted and strategic. Sure, you can create presences and tweet and post updates ‘till the cows come home, but will you get the results you’re hoping for?

Whether your Facebook page has 100 fans or 50,000 fans, a Facebook page requires ongoing attention to the type of content you post, frequency of posts, understanding about your users–what brings them to a page, what engages them to like, comment and share, and what keeps them coming back. If you’re serious about your Facebook page you cannot take a laissez -faire attitude, pages require ongoing commitment.

A group of advertisers on Facebook were randomly selected to be part of a test of broad category targeting. We first learned about this through one of our readers. We don’t know how many people were selected to be part of the beta test but one of the frustrating aspects for our reader was the fact that she couldn’t opt out and that she had a much needed campaign to run for her business.