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faced with the challenge of enticing their online friends and fans who are not yet customers to patronize their products. From the millions of friends and fans that a brand can get on Facebook they need to capture a sizeable number of loyal customers so as to get a good return on investment. Online marketers know that the true value of most Facebook friends and fans is not in their quantity but in their quality. Hence a brand has to be friendly itself to be able to win over new customers and build up its base of repeat customers. Brands must be able to connect with their Facebook friends and fans, engage with them and create mutual value.

What marketing strategies can a brand use in social media? Marketers have found three ways that bring in good results on Facebook. First is to recognize the fans and friends by ranking their engagement with the brand. If a brand provides content on its page that encourages friends and fans to cultivate habit-forming behavior, then it will better its chances of having friends and fans who not only engage once but repeatedly. Second is to give them exclusive deals. A brand can do this effectively by thinking like a fan to know what that fan likes. This is a time-tested marketing strategy and still works online. Third is to reward loyal customers with incentives. This is mutually beneficial as loyal customers can, on their own initiative, become ambassadors of the brand.

It’s not easy to know if most Facebook friends and fans of a brand are really there for the business, so it’s best for the company to find out by engaging with them. What other social marketing strategies can a brand use on Facebook?

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It has been reported that Facebook is introducing a totally new design and that all the more than 800 million Facebook users will have to learn the redesigned profile. Called Facebook Timeline, this big change will surely surprise you as you begin to use its features and get the hang of it all. The redesign will show a cover for your personal account that is quite a striking visual. While you may have read or been told of the Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline, chances are you didn’t know that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has used these even before the official launching. Yes, he probably gets to try first everything new in this social networking site.

Timeline was officially unveiled on September 22 in San Francisco during a Facebook developers’ conference, but Zuckerberg actually began using the cover of the new profile much earlier – on June 18 when he updated his cover photo and added a couple more for the first time. You can actually see the history of his cover photo uploads because these are open to all. Yes, you can see photos of his fluffy white dog on these covers. For your own personal account you would likely choose the best image or images you like because the cover photo is actually the main visual of the new profile. And any user can actually see your cover photo album despite privacy settings.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline may be history now and one may probably not know all the details of the early beginnings of the new look and style of Facebook, but for anyone who wants to dig into the past his story is available online. Now that it’s over a month after its release, how do you find Timeline, so far?

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Do you use Facebook emails? If not, have you even tried using it? Or are you one of the millions of email users worldwide who remained loyal to Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail after the introduction of Facebook email? The questions are valid because one year ago when Facebook email was touted to be the next generation messaging system the citizens of cyberspace were abuzz with the announcement. But now it seems to have vanished from the collective memory of email users who plod on with their old trusted accounts. Facebook email did not take off and has remained unpopular despite the worldwide popularity of its social networking site.

According to one critic the biggest reason for Facebook email’s unpopularity is that the user experience is very poor when it comes to managing email. What’s the use of creating a new account if one can’t organize the emails properly to make reading, reviewing and filtering them easy? The default view also was a problem to many who did not like the new formatting. While some found the seamless integration of messages from different accounts a novelty, others were just confused about the new feature. One user even went as far as saying that he was afraid of using Facebook email.

Yes, there were good comments about the easy way of switching between two mobile apps as well as the speed of sending images, among other conveniences, when one used Facebook emails, but these did not catch the fancy of the majority who maintained that their Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account worked fine for them. Perhaps it’s just that the older email providers have been there for quite a long time already and Facebook just came in late with their email service. The way things are it seems Facebook email is out of the big picture.

Facebook friends of its fans inasmuch as the total number of these friends can be as much as over 100 times the size of the fan base. This holds true particularly for brands that have over a million fans. With this wide reach, a brand can expect to gain more Facebook users browsing its page. This could lead to new customers. But, of course, all this could take some time especially for brands that are still starting out on the social networking site. It is therefore imperative that a brand create Facebook content that its fans would want to share to their friends.

A hundredfold increase in the number of fans should not make a brand rest on its laurels as this is not the ultimate goal. The bottom line has to be kept in mind and this means getting business from the fans, making them repeat customers and even advocates of the product. Engaging with the fans is the key to this goal. A brand should not be content with the number of likes it gets. It can’t just read the comments and leave them at that. What it needs to do is to reach into their newsfeeds and engage with the fans in a creative, interesting and entertaining way.

Making the content useful and relevant to the fans will give value to the time they spend for the brand on Facebook. This would make it easier for the brand to engage with the fans and turn them into its consumers who return for more as their interest is held. Naturally, for fans to be repeat customers, they have to be highly satisfied by the experience. Can a brand afford not to invite all Facebook friends of its fans?

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Change seems to be inevitable on Facebook and now another one, a big one called Timeline, has been rolled out in New Zealand before making it worldwide. This profile is a totally new design that needs getting used to for you to navigate comfortably as you say goodbye to the old version. This visually-rich design begins with a so-called cover in which you introduce yourself with an image that is quite large. The Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline are definitely a big change in this social networking site.

Following the cover, which is on the top part of the new layout, will be the main section of your stories and photos as well as all the previous posts. This will go back to the very first entry on your wall and will be sort of an online yearbook of your life. New entries will appear in this section and you can easily share everything with various social apps to express yourself, including such items as the songs you like. It will be here where your friends can know what’s up in your life and join in what you do. While the posts on the old version of Facebook profile were arranged in chronological order that required scrolling, this time it will be more of clicking than scrolling as you pull up a timeline in your life, say the year 2010. And be prepared to do things on two columns rather than just one.

Obviously Facebook is making these changes and many more to keep them on top of the online social networking world, especially since other sites are competing with their own special features. Will the millions of Facebook users like the new Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline so much so that they will stay with Facebook or will some of them get tired of the many recent changes?

No one seems to be talking about it now but a year ago email users around the world were abuzz over the announcement of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the “next generation messaging” system would be introduced by Facebook. This was said to be the “email killer” of such popular providers as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. The anticipation for its coming even created great speculation among online marketers who were making then a high return on investment doing email marketing to millions of users. “Get a facebook email”. Would that line ever gain popularity?

No. The excitement about it all soon died out as no impact was felt, and now a year later millions of email users around the world are comfortably using what they have been using since then, either a Gmail or Yahoo or even a Hotmail account. And online marketers have rested their fears about the possible negative impact on email marketing of Facebook’s so-called social inbox, which would have categorized marketing messages as junk. Despite the unpopularity of Facebook email, however, its social networking site continues to give businesses, especially small businesses, a boost in their online presence.

Some people did try out to get a Facebook email, especially users of the most popular social networking site in the world. They thought using Facebook email and the social media together might just simplify things as one would need to work on only one system. But, somehow, it did not catch on and Facebook email did not live up to its billing as an email killer. Perhaps the majority who had already been using email for years no longer wanted to learn anything new. Whatever the reason, it looks like Facebook is now content with the top standing of its social networking site, as there’s no visible sign of any development regarding its email service.

If you are a heavy user of Facebook, chances are you’ve come across quite a lot of changes in its layout and in the features the past few months. For some this is a welcome sign, but for others it is a headache, particularly Facebook Chat problems .

While it seems that Facebook wants to improve, what with the recent introduction of another social networking site, the changes have been radical and it now appears there’s a totally new Facebook! Old-timers who have become familiar with the older version of Facebook wanted it to stay that way, but they had to learn the new features or get lost along the way.

Plenty of changes have occurred recently, a sure sign that Facebook wants to stay on top and keep its millions of users. Chatting has not been spared, and one can now see additional friends who are online, unlike before in which only a few were listed. Your past messages with a friend are now also pulled up whenever you intend to chat with that friend, such that your conversation starts again from the last message sent.

The chat feature still is found on the lower right portion of the Facebook layout and online friends are identified by a green button next to their name. But some friends who are not online are also listed and some users consider this as one of the Facebook Chat problems . Why include those who are offline? Probably only the Facebook executives know!

Whatever the reasons for the many changes in Facebook may be, one thing is sure: Users don’t like Facebook Chat problems . Everyone wants to have a trouble-free life, including social networking online. So, is there a possibility that the kinks on the Facebook chat feature would be ironed out the soonest time?

With the constant transition of Facebook from one layout to another, Facebook Chat problems have certainly bubbled up. Since it was conceptualized in 2008 for subscribers in various age groups and countries, Facebook Chat has caused an inconvenience to some of its avid patrons. For instance, Facebook Chat these days is merged with your Private Message inbox and one will be having a hard time to distinguish which particular message hasn’t been read yet if one doesn’t dig deeper into old messages and chat threads.

By the way, Facebook Chat can also be viewed via iPhone, AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live and this can only make matters more complicated. If your Facebook account has been registered with your mobile number already, all new updates will be received in your phone. And when you receive a new chat thread, you will also receive it on your same cell phone and chances are you may not distinguish it from a regular update.

Another annoyance that one may experience in the new Facebook Chat layout is the popping up of an individual’s chat rant once the person is logged in on a Facebook Group where you also are a member. This can certainly be annoying if you don’t intend to chat with that particular person although, of course, you share the same interests.

For the time being though, Facebook Chat problems are here to stay. Google Plus is still in its infancy and it has not reached its market despite the hype associated with it. Twitter is only a mini diary and does not have a chat tool although it already offers video blogs nowadays. Tumblr is okay but these are usually used by teens only. So, the question is, are we to expect some more changes from Facebook in the coming months?

Facebook is quietly working on a completely different looking profile that has some interesting new features. The new profile will consist of a timeline of events that you can scroll too and the main focus will be an area where you can upload a beautiful image behind your profile picture.

Facebook is calling these Facebook Covers and we at FBExpressions are busy creating custom ones that you can apply to your profiles!

In about a week everyone will have the new profile layout but if you want a sneak peek at what Facebook Covers look like you can here.

What do you think of the new profile layout? Good or bad improvement?

Designing a web site has to take into consideration the variety of computer users across the globe whose likes and dislikes vary a lot. This also holds true in social networking sites, such that the Facebook profile layout has seen its share of changes over the years to improve its design. With the introduction of Google Plus, there now are two popular choices for social networking and users of both sites have noted the differences.

For example, there are those who say that Google Plus backgrounds are less congested in look and cleaner in details than the Facebook profile layouts, pointing out the easy to use drag-and-drop feature of Google as against the click-and-type of Facebook.

Another notable difference is in the use of icons, with Google Plus preferring bold and what some describe as attractive, whereas Facebook prefers a style highlighted by the color blue. In addition for the Google Plus, the backgrounds can be custom-designed. For Facebook users, additional features have been introduced every now and then to the design and these are announced in the updates.

Reviewers of these two social networking sites, who are themselves registered users, have traded their opinion liberally and one can read these in plenty of online sources. While one may agree or disagree with a certain viewpoint, the ultimate choice as to which has the better design naturally is arrived at personally by the user after trying out the features and comparing both.

The way things have been going recently, there is no doubt that the current Facebook profile layout and Google Plus background would still see some changes in the immediate future as more and more features are introduced. Users are waiting for updates and keep tabs on any development. Will a revised Facebook profile layout look better than a revised Google Plus background, or will it be the other way around?