Following the post related to how to get the most out of Twitter, here comes the one related to Facebook. We cannot stress enough on how important social media is nowadays, whether we are talking about social networking, bookmarking, micro-blogging and so on. Facebook is not only great for business but also for getting in touch with your prospects, making new friends and sharing your expertise as an authority in the industry you are performing.

1. Market your Facebook page

Once you have a Facebook page, a great step forward would be to add it to as many marketing channels as you can. From email signatures, business cards, even your homepage, all must contain this information in order to get fans that can become further customers.

1. Something new? Share it!

Have you hired someone lately? Have a new discount? Maybe you received a prize or just entered a new partnership? Update your Facebook page as often as you can but try not to make your updates only “advertising-related”.

1. Contests, discounts, deals

One thing is sure: people like spending less money for a product or service, less than they have been used to. Offer discounts and special deals for your fans with regularity. Another brilliant way to become more “like-able” is by creating contests. Use your imagination and launch a socially-engaging contest for your fans, there are literally hundreds of way of doing this. Hint: take a sneak peek on your competition as well…

1. Facebook isn’t just business

Write funny posts, ask questions, answer questions and contribute to the community. Share some insightful tips, communicate with your fans. Not to forget, the first thing a business must do in order to have a good start is to fill all the details, from URL, mission, information and so on.

1. Engage with your readers offline as well

Have fellow readers in your hometown? Know them face to face, post pictures on your page, let them know you are not just an online presence. However, when travelling away from your town see if there are any fans living in those areas and meet them as well, it’s all worth the effort!

The web designers at WebCreationUK have a strong presence on social media channels, check out our Facebook page and let’s have some fun!

As we got used to lately, social networking websites are coming with new and improved features for a better user-experience. On Sunday, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new redesign of profiles, change that is available immediately for all those wishing to upgrade but also will become a permanent auto-change in a short period of time.

Photos, friends and personal information are the main areas where Facebook guys thought about bringing some extra-features. The most important change has been made to the way personal information is displayed, right below the name. From where do you live to relationship status, work information and education information, all these are available from the start with small icons along with each piece of information.

Another change has been made to the way recently tagged photos are displayed, now a row of them being available under the personal information “box”. No reasons to think your privacy is threatened while they are only available to friends, this being an improved way to preview friends’ pictures.

When it comes to friends, two major improvements has been added by Facebook’s tech guys:

-          Search for a friend by name, current city, hometown, school and even interests

-          Friends’ highlighting: this can be used to showcase the most important friends of yours, whether we are talking about family, colleagues or other chaps.

Also, sending messages without leaving a friend’s profile is a great feature that already became popular amongst Facebook users. Again, these recently changes focus most on personal information and photos, we at WebCreationUK will keep an eye on this story while great changes are to be unveiled in a short time.

Do you want to upgrade your profile? Just go to Facebook.com/about/profile and do it while in a matter of weeks this change will be mandatory for all users.

Everyone was expecting this new email service from Facebook to be an email killer, there are lots of rumors online about it and it seems that we can finally see what the tech guys from the most popular social networking sites have been preparing for us in the last months. Facebook Messages seem to use a new technology that unifies messages, whether we are talking about SMS, email, instant messaging and so on, all these will be received/sent through the same channel.

Facebook Messages will contain three folders, each one designed for different purposes: one only for friends – the main Inbox -, one for “private” data like bank statements of bills and a third one for Junk emails. The fact that the Inbox will only contain messages from friends is quite interesting and again strengthens the idea of social. Let’s say for example someone that is not a friend of yours on Facebook sends you a message, that message goes to Other folder but once moved in to the “Social Inbox” all future messages received from that person will be treated as messages from friends thus jumping directly in the main Inbox. Unwanted contact prevention is something people were searching for a long time, whether we are talking about emails, SMS and phone calls and it seems Facebook’s new service can handle this with ease.

Another great feature of this service will be the ability of keeping all conversation history in an archive that can be accessed at any time. From your very first beginnings in a conversation to “after 5 years”, all will be there, nothing is to be deleted.

All those over 500 million registered users will receive an @facebook.com email address, but even if we call it an “email address” this is more like an instant conversation channel rather than an email. However, with all the latest privacy problems Facebook encountered, are you willing to share yet another private aspect of your online life?

As you probably know by now, the website designers from WebCreationUK are very active on their Facebook page, and if you do not know that by know you should probably follow our ramblings on the most popular social networking website.

As we wrote a few days ago, Bing and Facebook have partnered for what some are saying to be a new search results era: the integration of social networking from Facebook to organic search results from Bing. It was just a matter of time for Google to strike back and display their search results details from a social sharing “environment”.

Basically, Google seems to test the waters by adding a “Shared by number+” next to number of related articles, in their news section. This move from Google will show how popular a story is on Twitter or other social sites and it seems to perfectly respond to users’ demands, in simple words: if a story is so popular it really is worth clicking and reading it.

For now, the results come only from Twitter but it can become very helpful while trying to see which Twitter users are quoting or making comments on a particular link in their tweets. When clicking on the “shared by” link the user is taken to a window displaying real-time sharing activity from Google Updates.

This experiment showcases a great feature that every Google News’ user might use and we look forward to seeing how this will evolve in time. Latest signs from social networking and search engines world reveal that sharing becomes a very important part of the search engines results, the web designers from WebCreationUK are keeping an eye on this particular subject as it might be a new step forward for the online environment.

Personal data security on Facebook is once again under questioning. IDs from tens of millions of Facebook users were sent to at least 25 companies in advertising and Internet monitoring industry by Facebook’s most popular applications, an investigation conducted by The Wall Street Journal shows.

The information leak was produced by sending the IDs of users that used applications like Farmville (59 million users), Frontierville and Texas Holdem Poker. WSJ says: “ A WSJ investigation showed that ten of the most popular applications transmitted users’ IDs to advertising and monitoring companies.” The major information sent to those companies is the ID, or the “number” assigned to each person that activated an account. This number is part of all Facebook profiles and it’s public information so anyone can copy and paste that number into a search engine for finding information posted on Facebook, even though the information was set as private.

WSJ has discovered that those popular applications submitted users’ IDs to at least 25 advertising and databases companies. An example is RapLeaf Inc. which has created a huge IDs database from Facebook, subsequently sold for a fee to at least other 12  companies. RapLeaf’s Vice, Joel Jewitt claimed he had no intention to do this…

A spokesperson from Facebook announced on Sunday that will dramatically limit the information exposure on the most popular social network from the Internet.  After WSJ revealed details about IDs leak on Facebook, from Friday several applications offered by Facebook have become inaccessible. The spokesman said that they took immediate action to block applications violating their regulations.

Officially, Facebook prohibits information transmission through games, even if the user agrees with this practice. Stay tuned with UK web designers’ blog for more details regarding this issue.

A recent CNN study for how news is shared and consumed revealed that “shared news matters more”, in translation, social media is the most frequent way for sharing news online. The study was conducted on 2,300 people and the results were that 43% from the online news sharing piece is through the way of social media, through popular networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and MySpace. The other 30% shared through emails, 15% to SMS and 12% to Instant Messaging.

Other interesting results from this study show that 65% of shared content is regarding ongoing stories, 19% for breaking news and 16% is related to “funny” content,  however let’s discuss a little more about the news sharing through social media. Why is this the most used method for news sharing?

A simple and logical answer would be that social media is featured nowadays on almost all online sites. Just think about how can you share a story on Facebook? Click on a “Like” button and the story gets on Facebook in a blink of an eye. For Twitter the same patterns apply. By being accessible on each and any news website and being so easy to share stories through a single click, it’s no wonder why people choose to share news through social media instead of logging in to their email accounts, add the people for sending the news, copy/paste link and so on. Sharing through social media is indeed, a no-hassles way for making news popular nowadays.

As top UK website designers, WebCreationUK is also very familiar with the social media wave so you can easily follow us on Twitter or Facebook.