That’s right folks, if you’ve been holding onto that Facebook Share button for dear life it’s time to loosen your grip. Facebook has updated their Like button to include all the functionality of the old Share button. Now, a full story complete with headline, blurb, and thumbnail is posted to the walls of all who adore you and their friends can share and comment on it too!

Prior to these upgrades, the Like button only posted a link to the story in a user’s recent activity, and everyone breezed by it on their way to view the other cool stuff their friends posted. I don’t know about you guys, but with all the other cool stuff the Like button can do, I don’t see a need for the Share button anymore and neither does Facebook. Development on the Share button has been retired and they recommend using the Like button going forward. However, Facebook will continue to support the Share button for all you die-hard Share button lovers, who can’t let go.

If you have a Facebook Page you have been alerted to some pending changes. Last Thursday Facebook announced Facebook Page upgrades and rolled out the option for Page administrators to upgrade to the new format early. All Pages will change to the new format on March 10th. Quite a bit has changed including components of the layout, types of activities Pages can participate in, and even the way content is displayed on a Page.

Several of the new features are extremely useful and will help businesses to manage and market their Pages more effectively. The game is changing; make sure you’re in on the action!

1. Use Facebook as Page

Perhaps the most requested feature of all time on Facebook, is the ability of Pages to interact with users, groups, and other Pages. Pages have been locked out of most interactions on Facebook, requiring businesses to interact with a personal Profile instead which has worked well for some and has proven to be a major pain for others causing them to miss out on a prime opportunity to build relationships with consumers.

Full interaction with everyone is not yet an option for Pages. However, now you can use Facebook as your Page and interact with other Pages. Your Page can “like” other Pages instead of just adding them as favorites and you can leave comments and post to other Pages as your Page. This makes it easy to interact with other industry Pages as your company or brand.

Once you’ve upgraded your Page, you’ll see the link “Use Facebook as ____” in the top right corner of your Page. You can also access this feature in the account dropdown.

2. Photo Strip

Similar to the new Facebook Profile, the photo strip has been applied to Facebook Pages. The most recent photos on the Page will now be showcased across the top of the page.

3. Edit Page Category

Another sought after feature of Facebook Pages is the ability to change your Page category once the Page is created. Before the recent upgrades if you registered your Page as a product or service and later wanted it to show up as a local business you were left with the option to delete the Page and re-create it in a different category.

Now, the option shows up at the very top of the information you can edit on the back end of the Page. We regularly audit Facebook Pages for clients and find many times Pages are inaccurately categorized, I’m super excited for this new feature!

4. Alerts

The coolest part about using Facebook as your Page is the alerts! Notifications will appear as they do on your personal account for your Page while you use Facebook as your Page. You will be notified of new likes, comments, and posts making it a little easier to keep track of activity on the Page so businesses can effectively participate in the conversation.

5. Email Notifications

Once you upgrade your Page you’ll also be automatically enrolled in email notifications. Each time Facebook detects new activity on your Page you will receive an email at the address listed in your Facebook account. Note that these email notifications are on roughly an hour delay.

You can edit the email address the notifications are sent to or turn them off in the Page’s settings as well as in the settings of your personal Profile.

6. Wall Filters

The changes to the wall filters are the most controversial of all the Page changes. The filters have been simplified down to two options; view posts from everyone or just the Page. You will also find additional settings for filtering out profanity, setting an age limit, and created a moderation block list.

Sounds good right, so what’s so controversial? The algorithm controlling the order of posts has changed. Facebook has moved from sorting the posts chronologically to sorting them based on relevancy. Posts will now show up in order of relevance instead of the newest posts at the top of the page. If you rely on your Facebook Page to do business in real time, you can use Facebook as your Page and take advantage of both the email notifications and the built in alert system to ensure nothing is missed because it is deemed less relevant and moved to the bottom of the Page by Facebook.

Page administrators can also use ‘admin view’ found in the links in the left-hand navigation which provides two additional wall filters, most recent and hidden posts. The ‘most recent’ wall filter will give you a chronological view of all posts on the page, however visitors to the Page will see posts sorted by relevance.

7. Page Interaction Identity

Another cool feature, gives you the option to interact and moderate your Page as either you or your Page. Prior to the change, Pages automatically interacted on the wall of the Page as the Page and this continues to be the default setting. But now you can interact on your Page as you if you’d like. This can be extremely useful for companies who have recognizable people as part of their brand.

This feature can be found in the settings of the Page under posting preferences.

8. No More Tabs

Tabs are gone. Poof, they disappeared and were replaced by a left navigation similar to what is seen on the new Facebook Profile layout. Just like there was room for six tabs to be displayed across the top of the page with additional tabs hidden under a drop down, there is now room for six links displayed below the Page’s avatar with additional links hidden under a dropdown menu. Each of these links corresponds to what used to be a tab.

If you upgraded your Page and freaked out because the custom tabs you spent an eternity building are missing, you can find them amongst these links and they look cleaner!

9. Page Relationships

Facebook Pages used to have a section below the Page avatar that showcased the Facebook users who liked the Page with specific mention of the visiting user’s friends who liked the Page.

Facebook Pages now give a simple count of the total number of users who like a Page and showcases the other Pages that a Page likes instead of users who like the Page.

10. No More FBML

Don’t panic! You can still create custom Pages (tabs) within your Facebook Page with all of the coolness they’ve always had. You’re just going to have to do it without FBML.

Facebook is retiring the Facebook markup language (FBML) as of March 11, 2011 and replacing it with iFrames. Creating new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be an option. Existing apps and Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, but we recommend transitioning to iFrames to ensure there is no disruption on your Page.

Make sure to go over your custom pages (tabs), apps, and landing pages and get them updated. You can read more about iFrames at the Facebook Developer Blog.

Are you suffering from social media overload? Too many choices? Too much to keep up with? Just too much? Yeah, we get that a lot but there is a solution and it starts with the usual suspects; data and a plan!

Who Cares?
First things first, who cares about your product or service? Who is your target audience?

You know your business best and you know what kind of people might be interested in your products or services. You’ve probably been collecting data on purchases and even if you haven’t gone that far, you can probably put together a profile of characteristics and interests that match your target audience.

Once you’ve got the target audience pinpointed you can figure out where they might be hanging out online. There is a plethora of social media sites out there ranging from large networks that everyone participates in, i.e. Facebook to smaller niche networks for specific interests, think FatSecret.com.

Your task is to figure out where your audience is hanging out and involve yourself in the conversation on that network.

How Do You Find The Conversation?

There are several different ways to find relevant conversations that you can involve yourself in to start building relationships on social networking sites. You can use social media monitoring tools to gather data about conversations already happening about your brand, product, or service and identify the networks that have a high volume of relevant conversation. There are many tools that can help you gather this data.

Basically you’re looking for a social media monitoring apparatus that will let you search for relevant keywords across multiple platforms. These tools range in price from free to thousands of dollars on a monthly subscription. Once you’ve exhausted all of the free options you may want to seek help from a social media agency who’s already subscribing to some of the more expensive enterprise tools that you may not have the budget for.

What If There Is No Conversation?

If you find there is no conversation centered on your brand, product, or service look for opportunities to start the conversation. Now that you know who is interested in your stuff, participate in the conversations that are happening and look for opportunities to add value that is relevant to your business. Answer questions, suggest solutions to problems, and provide interesting and engaging content.

Be cautious not to impose on other conversations and spend the time to build rapport with others. The conversations will spark.

What If The Conversation Spans Multiple Networks?

No one ever said you had to choose one and only one network to get involved with. You can participate in as many conversations as you can keep up with.

Keeping in mind that interaction and a high frequency of targeted, relevant activity is necessary to be successful in social media marketing. Not to mention, every social network has a different atmosphere, requiring a different content. Make sure you have enough resources to allocate to keeping up with all of the conversations with which you choose to engage.

Create A Plan

Now that you’ve identified the networks that make sense for your business and you’ve started to participate in the conversation it’s time to draft a plan of action to get what you want out of social media marketing.

Draft your goals and strategy, collect data, analyze data, and use it to continuously adjust your plan as you continue to your social media journey.

Everyone is in a race to become Mayor of their local Starbucks on Foursquare these days. The geo-location phenomenon has been heating up as businesses offer badges, titles like Dutchess, Mayor, and Founder, coupons and deals in exchange for check-ins. All of which amount to incentive to cheat the system. Check-in applications like check.in are springing up, allowing users the ability to check in to multiple apps at once, and also making it easier for cheaters to prosper. Cheating, often in the form of drive by check-ins has become such a problem that FourSquare has recently added a feature that allows business owners to kick cheating Mayors out of office.

The stakes are rising; the latest trend in geo-location marketing is in rewarding users with more than just discounts and deals, but with anything from stickers to electronics and even cold hard cash. That’s right folks, the latest brainstorm from IZEA Innovation, the same company to bring us social media sponsorship applications like SocialSpark and SponsoredTweets has entered the geo-location space with WeReward.

WeReward launched at TechCrunch’s Disrupt earlier this year and allows users to earn cash for check-ins and tasks. Like other geo-location applications, WeReward loads a list of nearby businesses that users can check into. Each location has a number of points associated with it, users earn points as they check in and each point is worth $.01. Users can then cash out their accumulated points via PayPal.

Cash rewards for checking in and eating at my favorite restaurants, cool stuff right. But you’re probably wondering how this benefits business owners. Well these aren’t you’re usual vanilla check-ins. Users have to complete an action in order to claim their reward. Business owners just need to set the rules for the claim as something that requires a purchase.

Take Chick-Fil-A for example, they’ve set the rules for their claim as a picture of a user eating a spicy chicken sandwich or Chick-Fil-A nuggets. In order for the user to cash in on their points, they’ve got to buy one of these items and prove that they made the purchase.

I don’t need my favorite coffee shop to pay me a few pennies to keep my business, they’ve already snagged me, but I might try something new if I were rewarded in this manner. Can businesses really increase market share with bribery?

I think it’s worth a shot for many businesses, especially those in the restaurant space. I just hope those cheaters don’t start snapping pictures of me while I’m eating so they can get their $.40 without making a purchase!