There is a commitment involved in operating a business page on Facebook. Companies who are not prepared to support the effort with content and conversation should think twice before launching it. However, for those who are prepared to invest the energy, Facebook can be a great platform with useful tools for building out a fan base and optimizing your approach. Carnet Williams wrote this great article with 10 tips for Facebook fan pages. Here are some of the highlights:

I hear more questions about how to use Twitter than any other social media marketing platform. Most of the time these come from people who are fairly highly skeptical that it could be of any use at all to them. Fair enough. Here are ten great uses of Twitter (that are also likely to be profitable ones) borrowed from this great article at Socialnomics.com.

A recent study by Pear Analytics sought to determine the content of what is being posted to Twitter. They took 2,000 tweets in English from the public timeline over a time span of two weeks, with 200 tweets captured each half-hour from 11am – 5pm CST daily. They then categorized tweets into six different types: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversation, and pass-along value. Pointless babble won with 40.55% of the sample.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a survey that indicates that the share of online adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006. In addition television and movie watching are now an online experience for a third of internet users.

A recent Nielsen Company study has confirmed that the percentage of Twitter users 25 and younger is significanty lower than the percentage of the same group on the web as a whole. This indicates that Twitter’s recent growth is fueled completely by adult users which runs counter to most people’s intuitive sense that young people are mavens with all things social media.

I read an interesting article on HotelNewsNow.com about whether and how hotel owners and operators should respond to reviews of their facility on sites like TripAdvisor.  The article was interesting for two reasons:

It provides clear direction on what is usually a vexing question for the hotel
The information came from a discussion amongst the members of [...]

Facebook’s Social Ads Platform publishes statistics on the demographics of its audience for the sake of people looking to use their ad platform. I’ve embedded the full spreadsheet of data below but the surprising thing that jumps out is that the young users are declining at a rate of almost 20%. Some theories as to why this is so include:

On their blog last week Twitter announced that they are correcting follower and following counts with the end result being that “follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies.” It is interesting to see that they are taking lessons from the fate of MySpace and fighting misuse of their system before it becomes too rampant. What does this mean to you?

Google is now spidering Tweets and pulling them into search engine result pages (SERPs). This means that if you Tweet for a specifc business reason and are concerned about your online visibility you will want to take some steps to make sure that your Tweets are optimized for organic search. Here some tips to help you get Twoogled:

There is an interesting article over at Mashable about several higher education initiatives that utilize social media to create low or no-cost educational opportunities for participants. Thought the title of the article, “In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero”, suggests an unrealistic point, the examples in the article still cites actual ways that higher education is changing its delivery methods.