people to have their existence validated. It is a central component to being successful in marketing on Facebook and why I always tell my web marketing clients in Miami to be sure they understand, that marketing in general is never about you, but rather about me – your customer. If my interests, my needs, and my ego are at the core of your marketing then if your product is worth a damn – you win!

Yay me! I’ve been validated…

Everyone just wants to belong, right? In the online aspect of our lives, Facebook offers us that virtual sense of belonging. The study claims that Facebook meets two basic social needs: 1 the need to belong and 2 the need for self-presentation. Self-esteem and self-worth are associated closely with the first basic social need, to belong.

via Study: Why Do People Use Facebook?.

And in terms of time spent, social networking consumes more time than going to church; communicating by phone, e-mail, and snail mail; and exercising. “It’s just a little less than shopping and child care,” Colony said.

Today’s status quo won’t last, he predicted.

“We are in a bubble for social startups,” he said. When it bursts, “this is going to sweep away some of the nonsense, like FourSquare. We are going to move to a post-social world that’s a little like the Web in the year 2000. A lot of companies launched, but they did not survive.”

The next wave of social services will be “more efficient and more time-saving,” he said.

via Social networking’s salad days are ending, Forrester says | Deep Tech – CNET News.

Facebook subscriptions are about to blow up! At Le Web, Joanna Shields, VP and Managing Director for Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), announced that the company is planning to roll out a “Subscribe” plugin for all websites. The plugin will allow a website’s visitors a one-click way to begin following all of the news from an individual reporter, public figure, politician, celebrity, or anyone else who wants to post public updates via their Facebook user profile.

via Facebook To Launch A Subscribe Button For Websites | TechCrunch.

Subscribe to Ernan’s blog. He consistently posts the kinds of lessons all marketers should follow and does a great job explaining why things really work for other firms. If you want to stay on top of the best practices for marketing on the web, get on this list.

This article about Coke’s Facebook strategy is spot on for what we are always telling our web marketing clients here in Miami and that is that you have to open up to your customers and prospects, no matter what business you are in. The days of hiding behind a corporate veil are over. If you want to succeed for the long term, then let your customers into your business. Those that don’t usually don’t produce a quality product, so they fear the truth. If you fear the truth, then ask yourself if it’s really worth it to be in business.

Best Practice #3: Coke’s Driving Facebook Principle Is “Collaborate.” The page itself was founded by two Coke fans … and later embraced by the company! It is truly a shared undertaking with Coke fans who spend time on Facebook, not something imposed upon them from the outside.

The Takeaways for Marketers:

Conduct a comprehensive review of your branding and social media strategies. Develop strategies which enable you to answer “yes” to these questions:

Do you trust your brand enough to:

* trust your customers?

* give Facebook users an open forum?

* encourage and facilitate collaboration with your customers?

via Ernan’s Insights On Marketing Best Practices: Learn from Coke’s 3 Facebook Best Practices.

The click through rate for links posted to the news feed by Facebook Pages with over 100,000 fans is 0.14%, or 1 click per 715 impressions according to a new study shared with us by analytics provider EdgeRank Checker. Pages receive 0.00093 clicks per fan, or roughly 1 click per 1000 fans. These figures should give marketers an idea of how many Facebook fans they’ll need to accumulate to drive significant traffic to external websites, a core way of deriving return on investment from the social network.

Image via CrunchBase

via Links Posted By Big Facebook Pages Have A 0.14% CTR, 1 Click Per 1000 Fans | TechCrunch.

Related articles

• Facebook Ads vs Linked in Ads Part II (socialmediaobserver.wordpress.com)
• Creating a Facebook page for your business: FAQs (marketing.yell.com)
• The Brand Pages Faceoff: Google+ vs. Facebook (readwriteweb.com)
• Social Loyalty Platform PunchTab Raises $4.4 Million – TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

You wouldn’t know it from my recent posts, but I really like Facebook and respect what they have created, but in recent weeks and twice today, they’ve made it abundantly clear, that when it comes to users and small businesses they just don’t get it. Frankly though, this won’t only impact small businesses, but will also impact anyone in marketing, that is trying to keep it fresh on their Facebook page via blog posts being fed in from their site. Now Facebook is removing the ability to have your blog posts feed into your Facebook page automatically. We don’t ever advocate to our web marketing clients that they only use a feed to post content to Facebook and we help them keep their social media presence fresh and interactive, but this change just stinks for already overburdened marketers and business owners. I get it, they want to up the direct interaction and OWN the web, but it’s a strategy that disconnects them from the millions of businesses that want to also keep their content up to date in an easy way when they post something to their blog.

Here is what I saw when I logged in this morning. It might as well read – “we don’t care that you are overworked and stressed and we don’t care if this turns you off on how we feel about small businesses, because we have you and we can force you to do our bidding”.  Stupid.

Changes to How You Share Content in Notes

You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you’ll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your timeline. Learn more about notes.

Related articles

• Facebook Kills Notes Import (accesscomptech.wordpress.com)
• Be social: How can a blog help your small business? (marketing.yell.com)
• Everything We Learned about Sharing, We Forgot (digitalbrandmarketing.com)
• Can small businesses gain a competitive advantage through social media? (marketing.yell.com)

Evidently the data trackers at Facebook are seeing what I have been saying for weeks and that is that they are screwing up the model that made their system so addicting and that is that users use it to validate their existence and when they know that others may not see what they post, they will go elsewhere to send photos and updates. So, now Facebook is rolling out a Sort option to let users change the way they see their feed and get rid of the “let us do the thinking for you” model. Of course, the Sort to most recent is not the default option, because Facebook thinks their algrotihm is more important than their users needs and experience and so users have to know enough to make the change and see things how they want them. Here’s why this is still a miserable failure, because it still doesn’t mean your friends will see what you post, because they may not know how to make the change or even that they can.

Arrogance can be a very good thing in a technology company and it can be a bad thing. In this case it’s Zuckerberg trying to be Steve Jobs and know what is best for users, but in this case he doesn’t know what is best for users or his business.

Over the next few days, Facebook will roll out a “Sort” option at the top of the news feed that lets users select to see Recent Stories First instead of the default Highlighted Stories. The new feature should appease users miffed by Facebook’s move to combine the old Most Recent and Top Stories news feed tabs into a single stream. Until now, the hybrid news feed launched in September forced users to first see what Facebook considered the most relevant content. Some users found these decisions inaccurate even though they have the option to teach the algorithm.

The Sort feature lets users prioritize real-time updates over older content that’s been deemed compelling because of Likes, comments, clicks, and the viewer’s relationship to a story’s author. However, it doesn’t split the feed in two. Facebook tells me “The intent behind these updates is to make News Feed easier to navigate while still showing all the news in one place.”

via Miss “Most Recent”? Sort Facebook’s News Feed By Recent Stories First | TechCrunch.

Busy, busy, busy day. This is a great chart of the winner’s and losers in the most recent update to Google’s search Algorithm.

However, the sites that lost SEO visibility after the changes didn’t seem to represent any one group, as they also included some brands, blogs, broadcasters and even Google’s own Blogger.com, which dropped over 20%.

via The Winners & Losers Of Google’s Freshness Update Revealed | TechCrunch.

I’ll check it out and post more, but Google’s “Facebook” is becoming more Facebookish today with the launch of pages.

Google+ is taking another major step needed toward becoming a full-fledged Facebook rival: it’s launching Google+ Pages, which allow brands, products, companies, businesses, places, groups, and everyone else to establish a presence on the service. The product is a lot like Facebook Pages, but there’s one major difference: Google is baking some elements of Google+ Pages deep into its bread-and-butter search product.

via Google+ Launches Pages, Opens Floodgates For Brands (And Everything Else) | TechCrunch.

Today, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items.

Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an unfolding news story or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results.

via Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacts 35% Of Searches | TechCrunch.