Far too often people will create a Facebook presence for their business without any regard for search engine optimization. Google indexes Facebook Pages on a regular basis just like it does any other website so it’s important to use whatever way you can to boost SEO on these pages. Everything that is necessary when optimizing your website is just as important on your Facebook Pages.

Here are 7 ways to boost SEO of your Facebook Pages:

1. Keep in mind that any gated pages you have (ie, pages requiring a “Like” or “invite” in order to gain access) will not be indexed by Google.

2. Often and consistently use your brand or business name in headings and page tabs.

3. While wall posts are indexed, it’s custom tab titles and “Likes” that hold the most weight and will give you the greatest return.

4. Links from multiple sources help a lot with SEO. Links to custom tabs on your business page will be weighted heavily if they’re from popular and recognized sources.

5. Multimedia posted on your Facebook Pages are an excellent opportunity for SEO enriched titles, descriptions and alt tags.

6. Be sure to put your SEO-rich text where the search engines can see and index it. Keep in mind that any text embedded in an image will not get indexed.

7. Nothing beats well-managed pages. Keep your content fresh, interesting, and engaging to get the most fans and keep search engines coming back.

As if Social Media isn't new and exciting enough, there's lots of things going on recenetly and soon in the social media world.  Not only will it shed some light on your efforts, but also integrating more and more with your other marketing mediums especially, Search Engine Optimization.

Facebook just announced that their new insights/analytics is being released for Facebook pages tomorrow, October 6th, 2011.  For our clients, we'll be reviewing your insights more this month and providing you some more detailed information about our successes with our new Social Media Specialist, David Hutnik.

If you haven't seen anything about the new Facebook insights, here's a quick blog on it:  http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/10/03/people-talking-about-this-page-insights/

Impacts on SEO
Squidoo is launching magazines.  We use Squidoo for our SEO efforts to build content supporting your popular keyword phrases we're targeting on your site.  Just recently, they've become #73 in the top websites surpassign Hulu, NBC, or Digg. 

By launching online magazines, Squidoo will give us more power to publish our online content supporting your site and should have a great impact on supportive PR for SEO purposes.

Google+ button is a pretty huge success - A couple Key Announcements:

 "Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day." Nick Fox, VP of Product Management at Google

And on the enhanced search ads marketing website, the company claims: Our +1 button is being served 2.3 billion times a day all over the web.

That's incredible impressions of the new Google +1 button.  It is so important you jump in the game now and get this implemented on your site.  Give us a call if you still don't have it.  If we just put it in your header we can implement it in less than an hour.

Last but not least - Facebook is launching the new "timeline" profile, which I'm sure you've heard about.  Facebook is testing it out on some profiles so you may already see it,  but it should be rolling out to everyone soon.  It was pushed by a week by the court as there is a potential issue with the "timeline" name and a small Chicago based company.

Also, Facebook is launching their new “Gestures” which means that developers can turn any verb into a button.  Instead of "liking" something, we will start to see "booking", "watching", "listening", etc...  We'll be leveraging this for our customers as well.

Couple new Facebook Stats:
1)  Facebook has now hit 800 Million users adding about 50 million since July; and most are considered active.
2)  Facebook just saw a new record for the most visitors in one day: a ridiculous 500 million!!

If you haven't taken advantage of our Social Media services, now's the time.  Give us a call or contact your account manager for further details!
 

Are you the ultimate football fan?  If you are, like our Facebook page - www.facebook.com/intercoastalnetdesigns and upload a picture of you being the ultimate football fan to our facebook wall or email contests@icoastalnet.com and be entered to win a $100 gift card.

Today is the last day to enter your photo.  It can be a person, a sports room, your pet.  Once you post or send it in, we'll post all of them in our gallery.  Then, you'll get your friends to vote for you.  The picture with the most votes will win $100 visa giftcard.  Follow us on Facebook for more information!

 

We live in a world where people want immediate gratification and MUST see their revenue directly related to social media or their not buying in to the fact that there IS a strong return coming from a social media investment. I'm going to take you through a few reasons why social media has never been so important to your business.

•    25% of ALL US traffic is Facebook
•    More time is spent on Facebook than: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing & YouTube; COMBINED
•    YouTube receives over 2 billion viewers per day and is the 2nd most popular search engine
•    Over 750 MILLION users are now on Facebook!

Now that you know your brand MUST be involved in social media, let me show you 5 other ways to effectively measure the success of your efforts and the return on your investment.

Customer feedback and sentiment
Whether you like it or not, customers will have both good and bad experiences throughout the life of your company (hopefully more good), and they need a way to share it. Before anyone thinks about going to an actual review site, many of them choose to post at a place where over 750 Million other people are and where over 25% of all time spent online is; Facebook. Good experiences shared here are automatically shared with all of their connections on Facebook and bad experiences give you a chance to publicly make them better.
→ If you could identify all of the bad experiences from customers and make them better before they will inevitably share that experience with 100+ friends, would you?
→ If you could take every person that had a good experience and turn it into a personal endorsement to all of their friends, would you? (avg. facebook user has 130 “friends” on Facebook)

Social media customers are more valuable
A case study from CareOne <http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-customer-value/> shows you just how much more valuable your social media clients are likely to be over your clients that aren't involved with your social media.

Top of mind advertising
As people engage with your social media channels and “Like”/ “Follow” your brand, they will be noticing your posts and looking at your logo.  This keeps your business on the top of their mind next time they go to purchase a product or service that you offer.

How much are impressions and traffic worth?
I manage a brand that receives roughly 200,000 page views a month, but yields over 1 million impressions on Facebook alone each month.  Facebook and Twitter are consistently 2 of the top 10 referrers of traffic.

Control the search engine
When you Google your business name, what comes up?  Likely, many of your potential customer will perform this action, what will they see?  If you have anything negative or potentially negative, possibly a competitor comes up, you can control this by allowing social networks to dominate this placement.

I too am a bottom-line, metric driven individual that needs to tie every marketing effort to the bottom-line.  I encourage you to be a little more open minded about what you are measuring and where you find the value in your social media efforts.  It's not all about immediate sales, or even traffic; you could be measuring brand mentions within social media, impressions within social media, overall targeted fan/follower acquisition (which is truly more than just a number), number of messages sent to your social media followers, and more!  Let us help you understand what your social media objectives are and how we can accomplish them!

Jumping into Social Media is all about cultivating and building new and existing relationships.  Is it important?  -Some experts say that Social Media will be more valuable and widely used than search engines within the next 3 years!  With Intercoastal Net Designs, you WILL see increased traffic to your website, search engine placement, new relationships, sales and MUCH MORE…
 
Building Relationships
Social Media is all about building new relationships and cultivating existing ones.  By encouraging interaction, facilitating a platform for questions and activity, and networking with individuals on a more personal level; we will build these relationships, develop your connections and gain trust from clients and partners.

Managing the Conversation
Whether you like it or not, people are going to talk about your company and brand.  We are providing a platform for people to speak so that you can control the conversations and leverage them to your advantage.

Maintaining a platform for questions
Potential clients often need a place to ask their questions, whether they are intended for you or other clients.  We will encourage this activity and facilitate the questions that are asked.  A relatively quick response time can be very important to retain an active page.  With questions that require specific knowledge, we will notify you to either answer the questions or direct Intercoastal Net Designs how to correctly answer these questions.

Brand Recognition
The number of users that will see your brand, your logo, and your name on a daily basis will increase drastically.  Because of the nature of how Facebook was created with News feeds, viral marketing tactics to increase brand recognition is a great advantage of using Facebook for business.  Every time that there is an update given on one of your Facebook pages, all of your friends see this on their “News Feed” when they log in.  Further, every time one of your friends interact on your page by leaving a comment or doing a number of other interactions, a message is posted on all of their friends news feeds!  This puts a great deal of value attached to each additional fan.

More Interaction by Fans = Greater Brand Recognition

Creating Brand Loyalty
This increased brand recognition will develop into brand loyalty.  You don’t want to just sell a product or service; you sell an experience that brings them back time and time again.  Further, this experience makes them want to refer you to their friends and family.  By building relationships and increasing brand recognition, you will be cultivating this brand loyalty through-out Facebook and encourage users to come back to company again and again.

Top of Mind Advertising
The Facebook News feed is a powerful tool that keeps your brand and name in front of users on a daily basis.  Like any advertisement, you want your name to stick in a client’s head.  As we post more content within the fan pages and users interact as well, News Feeds will be filled with content to keep your name on the top of a clients mind for the next time they are looking for a home or asked for advice on home buying from a friend.

Create referrals through personal connections
A personal referral is much stronger than a random advertisement that you see online or on television.  By having a Facebook presence, you are giving users the opportunity to “Suggest to Friends” the pages and brands they enjoy.  Additionally, the interaction on a page suggests to their friends satisfaction with a company and entices them to come and look at a page as well.

Utilize viral marketing
Viral Marketing is all about encouraging clients and brand supporters to share content with their sphere of influence.  Both Facebook and Twitter are two of the most widely used forms of viral marketing as it is easy to do and many of their connections are already on these social networks.  On Twitter, you can simply “Retweet” a comment to all of your followers to share content that you thing they will enjoy or find interest in.  Further, you can give credit to someone on Twitter by “Mentioning” them which will link back to their profile. 

On Facebook, viral marketing is done through a news feed with every action you take place.  Although there are security settings that you can use to restrict the content that is shared, most users do not restrict this content.  Fans can “Like” posts as well as comment on each post, both of which are generally shared in all of their connections news feeds.  Further, they can leave a new post on your pages which will also be shared in the news feeds of their connections.
We want to turn “Fans” into fanatics that enjoy sharing content and news from your company to fully take advantage of this very powerful viral marketing strategy.

The Human Side
Advertising with Social Media has turned the old way of marketing from a “1 to many broadcast” (Television Commercial) to a “1 to 1 conversation”.  Users don’t want to think of themselves as 1 in a crowd that is bunched in your target market.  They want to feel noticed and have more of a connection with companies that they deal with.  By putting a face and a name to a business, you are showing off the human side to your company.  You are creating relationships and showing the average user that you care about each individual.  Through social networks, we are going to show off the human side of your business.

Gather Feedback & Listen
It is great to think that every little effort is going toward bringing in new clients, but sometimes you need to stop and ask about the customer’s needs.  This is why you often research with surveys and questionnaires.  Through Facebook, you can retrieve immediate feedback from the “Fans” that care the most.  By asking the users on Facebook and Twitter what they think, you get real feedback on ideas while showing them that you genuinely care.

Give advice and become an industry resource
By giving advice on industry news, giving tips, and sharing your industry thoughts; you are opening up to the type of people that will come to your fan pages and share your brand.  Becoming a resource in the industry lets people know your stance and that you are here to help them.
Joining industry groups

Again, opening up your target market and bringing more users into your social circle to share your name is a major point of emphasis.  As you join industry groups and connect with big industry players, you will find that they have a larger network to share your content with.  We want to build strong relationships with these influential socialites and encourage them to spread your company’s brand.

Becoming friends with industry professionals
Industry professionals can be very influential and have a strong following on both Facebook and Twitter.  We want to connect with their existing fan pages to reach out to a larger crowd.  Also, these industry professionals have a strong network of personal connections that we would like to tap into.  Leveraging these partners and taping into the connections through a personal referral will be a key strategy to build a fan base and following.

Hosting fun competitions with giveaways
Once we are able to build strong social networks, we want to keep them active and coming back.  We would like to host competitions and have giveaways enticing them to share your company with their networks.  This will grow your social networks in numbers and in loyalty.  The bigger the giveaway, the more effective this competition will be.

Follow like-minded users on Twitter
As we tap into the industry professionals on Facebook, we will be doing the same on Twitter.  Sharing their content and building relationships with existing influential Twitter users will aid in the growth of this network so that when we have a message to get out, we will have more targeted followers to receive this message.

Making the Connection
Creating links between all of the social networks and cross connecting them with your corporate website and blog are vitally important.  This is where we turn your typical interactive fans to closed sales.  Don’t worry about how to set these up, where they go or how to implement the process; we take care of it all.
Utilize the highly targeted “Facebook Ads”

Facebook ads are some of the most effective online advertising as they allow you to target a very specific group based on information provided in a users profile.  We can leverage this information that is provided by Facebook users to find potential clients and bring them to your company’s Facebook Fan Page.

Cultivate Targeted Followers
We will be using “Tweet Adder” to find targeted Twitter users.  This is software that allows you to search for users who might be interested in your service based on things that they mention and people they follow.  This will allow us to grow a following base of users on Twitter and bring your company potential clients.

Staying Current
In an industry that is evolving so quickly like Social Media, it takes many hours a week to stay up to date with the newest trends, strategies, and techniques to become successful.  If you look at the evolution and impact of Social Media in the last:  1 year, 3 years, 6 years (Facebook Launched); it’s mind-blowing the ongoing change that has occurred.  Many predict that Social Media Optimization will be more important and valuable to a company than Search Engine Optimization in less than 3 years!

CONTACT US TODAY TO LEARN MORE!

Question:

How is our Facebook monitored?  I do not use now for myself... on a business Facebook, can we view before allowing comments to show?  As you know, there are a few ugly people in the world who like to put themselves out there...

Answer:

While there is no way to "moderate" comments on Facebook, there are a few tricks so that you can keep watch.  When you make a post, go in and like that post that way anytime someone would make a comment you will be notified.  If you are finding you are having more negative reviews and comments then positive, the most important thing is how you handle those negative posts.  Many times your followers will stick up for you before even having to respond, but if you do, make sure you are proactive and using the customer service skills to turn that customer around.

If you want to go a super conservative approach, you can turn off wall posting in your "wall settings" area of your page.  I don’t recommend this because you want to have all the positive feedback from your followers.  ICND also offers a Social Media plan for a monthly amount.  We help monitor all your posts, get you set up with feeds so everything is posting on FB, Twitter, your blog, etc., help you out with setting up Facebook Tabs, Sweepstakes, Follower generation and incorporating the benefits of social media into your SEO plan.  Plans start at 3 hours per month and go up depending on how many projects we get into.  We do require that you have someone on your end who can be quick to respond to negative postings should they happen.
 

Please contact me if you should have some more questions or like to know more about our Social Media Plan.

Vanessa Humes

Sales & Marketing Director

InterCoastal Net Designs
*****************************
PO Box 7633
Ocean Isle Beach, NC 28469
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Phone: 910-575-6095 x2
Fax: 910-575-1095

 

What to expect and what to see in 2011...

Hotels

In the first quarter of 2010, RevPAR increased around the world with the America's being up 5.3% according to Smith Travel Research (STR).  In 2011, the growth is on trend to continue across the globe. It's obvious that, although today’s bookings aren't quite where they were at during the pre-recession days, the industry is slowly managing to crawl out of its slump.  Which is good news for all of us!

Travel Industry:

With so much inventory on the market for rentals, competition remains strong and customers are becoming increasingly selective as they can.  In order to take advantage of the upward trend, travel operators will need to be increasingly flexible in not only marketing their rooms, but determining what price their customers are willing to pay.  Vacationers have a wealth of comparative pricing information at their fingertips with portal sites, ensuring that they won’t book if a hotel or vacation rental's pricing is too high. More and more, even a few dollars can make the difference between a customer booking and not booking with a property or company.

This year it will be more important to stay on top of your game in the online marketing arena and companies who do so and put their budgets into online marketing will reap the rewards in 2011 more so than any other year we've seen thus far.  Gone are the days we'll be able to rely on direct mailings and a few postcards and we'll need to take every avenue to stay on top of the trends in online marketing.

Think about how Google's $700 million takeover of ITA Software, which will not only make the internet powerhouse a serious operator in the travel business, it will also rewrite the rules for bookings. As Google keeps its hooks in every inch of the internet, it will seed its travel offerings throughout the online space. It's very possible that starting as early as this year, web surfers logged into Gmail will be able to plan and book their entire vacation with a few mouse clicks inside the Google web ecosystem, making it much easier to do from anywhere, while on the go.

Mobile will also take a bigger role in 2011 than in 2010.  Check your Google Analytics and pull last years data with mobile users compared to 2010.  2011 will be even stronger.  Customers, particularly, business travelers, will make even more booking while on the road or in the air and as close as while sitting on the boardwalk outside of the hotel while sipping on a tropical cocktail.  They have the chance to wait until the very last opportunity to grab the last minute deals in an arena where there's tons of inventory left and we're fighting for every dollar.

To top it all off, vacationers will be using more and better smartphone apps to sniff out available rooms and, crucially, the best prices on those rooms and rentals. According to Priceline, 58% of customers with mobile devices made their booking within 20 miles of their hotel where they ended up staying. More impressively, 35% of those polled were within one mile when they clicked on the “reserve this room” button.


Consumers have the power

We've been preaching it for years, but the recent boom in rooms and houses available to rent, along with the advanced OTA's and their ability to dominate the search engines, topped with the technology of smart phones and on-the-go research sets up an interesting arena for 2011.  Driving your customer loyalty with programs and customer relationship marketing strategies will play a crucial role in this years marketing.  A huge development just taking place has been American Airlines pulling form Orbitz and subsequently being dropped by Travelocity.  American Airlines now relies on their own website to deliver the marketing message that they will find the best deals with AA.  Even though they are driving down prices, they avoid the costs of placement and fees with the OTA's.  Travel leaders will need to find their own solution to optimizing their bookings OTA's as well as their own websites.   Increase customer loyalty through programs and interacting with social media.


Social Media

With Facebook taking the lead over Google and other powerhouse websites at the end of 2010, we'll see a huge shift in the involvement of Social Media in your overall marketing mix.  Sooner rather than later,  the travel industry will find a way to book within Facebook and need to plan accordingly, before they lose out on valuable social media bookings.

Local Search – Make Sure You Claim Your Listings!

In a sea full of big fish, you want to make sure that you brand is protected.  One way to do that is to optimize your local search listings.  Beyond Google and the major search engines (Bing Local and Yahoo Local), here are some other useful places to be sure to claim your listing and optimize for your business name and specialties:

Facebook and Twitter Places – Above Facebook and Twitter fan pages for your business, you need to make sure that your Social Media pages for Facebook and Twitter are also included in the Facebook and Twitter Places so that your business info is available via mobile Facebook check in.  Also Twitter is experimenting with this feature so be sure to update your info at Localeze.

Location Based Social Media – Be sure to have a social media presence and business listing information located on all the social media sites that allow mobile users to check in such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

Local Search & Business Directories – There are many local search site directories throughout the internet that get a significant amount of traffic for local search.  Making sure you have an optimized listing on these sites can add traffic to your site for people looking for you or businesses like yours.   Some of the top directories we recommend you claiming your listing would be:
 

•Merchant Circle
•Local.com
•Superpages.com
•Yelp
•YP.com
•Intuit’s Business Directory
•Magic Yellow
•ShowMeLocal
•WhitePages.com – Business Search
•Yellow USA
•Yellowbot
•BOTW Local
•Boulevards
•CitySquares
•Get Fave
•Kudzu LocalLife
•Mojopages
•OpenList
•Tupalo

 
The benefits of optimizing these listings are many:

•Branding – when someone types in your company name your results show and link directly back to your site

•Online Reputation Management – by monitoring these listings, you’ll have instant access to positive and negative reviews about your business.

•Inbound links – having information and quality links back to your site helps build credibility to the search engines

•Increased traffic – These smaller directories account for 10-20 million monthly local search queries.  Having a presence will increase your traffic to people looking for businesses like yours in the area.

For more information about claiming your listings or to get help with this, contact us at info@icoastalnet.com.

The thought of the Wild Wild West, no laws, no boundaries, no regulations.  It appears that the internet is a bit like the Wild Wild West.  Sure many of our laws and regulations of our for fathers and law makers give us some boundaries, but with many circumstances, the internet is still unregulated when it comes to privacy, hackers, and how businesses can operate.

The thought came to me after watching a TV special about the new movie "Catfish" a semi-documentary about a so-called "online romance" that suddenly turned into a suspense.  The main character, Nev fell in love with a girl named Megan.  After he had done a Google Search for one of the songs she had supposedly played for him he found out she was nothing but a fake.  This was not before he fell madly in love with her and wished to meet her.

Megan turned out to be a mother who lived in Michigan with her husband, two handicapped sons, and young daughter.  Diagnosed, schizophrenic, she had stolen people's pictures off of the internet and created characters for each of them and a whole story plot.  Though there were no laws broken, there were definitely broken hearts.

The internet opens your life to all kinds of privacy concerns from identity theft on social media sites, passwords, credit card numbers, and social security numbers.  It makes it even more important than ever that you host and create your website with people that you can tangibly touch, pick up the phone and call.  If someone like InterCoastal Net Designs manages your domain name, be wary of schemes from "businesses" that send you bills and emails for renewal.  Also, if ICND doesn't manage your domain name, make the call and let us help you never lose your domain name to anyone else. 

It's the Wild West out there.  Make sure your with a professional company you can trust.

If you don't have a Facebook Fan Page for your company yet, well... We've got a lot of work to do with you, but let's get started.

Here's a few quick facts about Facebook:

To create a Fan Page, you must first create a profile for yourself.  The follow these instructions:

1. Click on Advertising link at the bottom of the page
2. On the left side of the page click on "Pages" and then the "Create a Page" Button
3. Fill out all the information about your business including all the important things like what you are, what you do, where you are located (or web address) and post a logo.

Now that you have a fan page you can suggest it to all of your friends.  You can also message your friends to please suggest your page to their friends and feel free to interact with it.  This will help generate credibility for your page and let everyone know what you've been up to.

Make sure all of your marketing materials, your website, signs, emails, brochures, business cards ask your customers and visitors to follow you on Facebook.

Post useful unique information.  Hold contest such as picture submission, trivia, and website hunts.  It will help people interact and engage.  Be sure to visit your page often, post often, but not too often.  As an admin of your page, Facebook will send you reports of new visitors.  If you are losing visitors, you may be posting too much or not enough good information.  Change your strategy.

By Vanessa Humes


This week Facebook unleashed it’s new Facebook Places, a geo-location based feature that allows users to share where they are, check in on people around them, and find out about events and services offered in their area.

Partnering with other location-based networks such as Gowalla, Four Square, Yelp, and Booyah, Facebook has brought on a whole new dimension to Social Media that hasn’t had as much hype before.  But will it stick?

Even though with partnerships and opening up its API data for developers to create other applications with this Places features, Facebook must overcome privacy concerns that people will like and adapt to this new feature.  Users will automatically be “checked-in” to places and this news will post in your friends news feeds.  The common concern users face is the question of, if this person was truly my friend, wouldn’t they already know where I like to hang out? Facebook stalking has just been taken to a new level.

My first perception of Facebook Places is this is nothing new… Four Square has been doing this for a long time and there are even geo-location social media sites that date back to 2006.  But for the majority of internet and social media users, Facebook still hold the share of users time so intergrating with Facebook is a logical solution to push this new media.

What’s this mean for businesses and marketing?  There is an opportunity to advertise your brick and mortar business to Facebook Places and the partnership subscribers when they are looking for things to do in their location.  In addition, businesses will be promoted by the ability for user to share where they are and what they are doing.  The integration with Yelp will eventually help ratings pull in for these places and businesses.

How do you plan on taking advantage of the opportunity that presents itself with Facebook Places?

So you have a blog or forum, and you are gaining lots of great content on there. Many times your readers may see something that they want to share with others on via Facebook, but copying link URLs and typing notes manually can be a burden. The Facebook Share button solves that issue!


Now, by adding a link like the one above to your blog code, you can give them the ability to share your blog entry details and a link  to the individual entry with one click. Facebook will open a small popup window where you can add additional notes if you wish, and select an image to go along with the post in some cases.

Thanks to the work of many diligent programmers, these types of Facebook Share buttons can now be added to all types of blogs, whether they be Wordpress, BlogCFC, Blogger / Blogspot, or a custom blog you had specially built for your own site. Because every blog varies to some extent you may need a little technical know-how (or a friend who is a programmer) but the process is fairly quick and painless.

If you have a blog or forum and  you want to include the Facebook Share button in its features, feel free to read up on the Facebook Developers wiki here:  http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share

If that gets a little too deep or out of the scope of your abilities to set up, just drop a note to our Support team at support@icoastalnet.com and we will schedule a time to install it on your website for you.

Cheers, and Happy Blogging!

Facebook has recently added some new features and made some changes that, from this reviewers point of view, helps the user experience quite a lot.

One of the most annoying things I found about Facebook is that my posts (which are ALL very important, and should be read and responded to) can quickly be lost in the "push-down" process of real time postings coming in. Translation: other peoples posts that come in after mine, push mine down and then OFF the wall. No good.

Now you can click on the "most interesting stories" deemed so by the Facebook team/machine. I'm guessing the stories are those posts that get the most interaction, but I could be wrong. "Interesting" is a relative term and I'm curious how a machine could figure that out.

You can also check out all LIVE FEED (which appears as a link at the top of your WALL) to view all the posts in real-time chronological order.

But before you get all misty eyed about Facebook's recent user experience facelift, consider that changes have been made to the "advertising" experience (and the way(s) marketers can advertise) as well.

See all changes at Facebook's official press release: Facebook News.

I have to admit. I'm not very enthused about Facebook's decision to allow users to create Vanity URLs for their profiles (and pages...though I haven't seen any for those yet. Not sure who is eligible, and when the rest of us will be?)

Of course, it just makes sense that a person can give out easy-to-remember static looking URL's to their family, friends, and clients/customers instead of a long string of variable gobbledeegook. But, I knew - as an SEO professional - that the mad rush to SQUAT on the best keyword phrases would ruin the usefulness of Facebook's move.

Can I blame anyone for the rush? Nope. The opportunity is there, so why not take it? I blame Facebook for allowing the opportunity to be there in the first place. How fair is it that some unrelated person, business, or organization can steal (take) your name, your identity, or more likely, YOUR MAIN KEYWORD PHRASE?

First come, first serve. And that's all that qualifies you to choose your URL "username".

And the change is permanent? So no swapping. Once you're TheKiKi, or MyrtleBeachSEO, you're that until death do you part. Does that mean the squatters can't unload the goods? Not sure, but money talks so there's always a way around such obstacles, like swapping account logins. And is Facebook monitoring for copyright infringement of identity theft...or can anyone swoop in a take Nike, McDonalds, Coke...or even Barrack Obama or Kobe Bryant?

In the coming weeks (probably much less than that) you'll see Facebook pages inundate the SERP's. And the 'why' is obvious. Facebook hit critical mass some time ago, and continues to balloon. Think of how many times you see Wikipedia pages in the SERPs.

I hope that Facebook makes good on its promise to combat blatant squatting. And, I hope that Google and the rest of the Search Engines do their due diligence with their own algorithms. After all, the premise of the page URL's text [ALWAYS] properly defining the focus of the page went south when the first black hat SEO salesman crawled out of the mud.

Maybe I'm peeved that someone got to my name on Facebook before I did? I can only imagine how annoyed I'd be if someone snaked the name of my business.

So let's have some fun, and you tell me whose side Facebook is on. The common man (and thus small business) or the Superstar and million dollar brands.

Go to

www.facebook.com/kobebryant

www.facebook.com/lebronjames

www.facebook.com/ashtonkutcher

www.facebook.com/barackobama

www.facebook.com/coke

www.facebook.com/pepsi

 

And watch what happens. Do you think Facebook would let you - oh common man - set something up like that for yourself or your business?

Now start searching for things that you KNOW what have been snatched up right at midnight Saturday morning, like Disney or Myrtle Beach (yeah, Myrtle Beach...I know there are plenty of companies licking their chops over that one).

Find any other glaring inconsistencies in Facebook's new vanity URL's. Let us know. Disgree with me...well you can let me know that too.