New Facebook Pages: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

New Facebook Business Pages:  After rolling out Timeline on personal profiles, Facebook is now rolling out Timeline for Business pages. Timeline changes the design and layout of Business pages and makes them look like personal profiles.

All Facebook Business pages will be moved to the new Timeline by the end of March. You can curate the information on your page beforehand.

Here are some important additions:

• The new header space provides more branding possibilities. But there are restrictions on the information you share in this new header regarding pricing, promotions, contact information and various calls to action. Be sure to check out these restrictions and learn more about Facebook pages.
• Only three Facebook apps can now highlighted directly underneath this new header. Your other apps are still available through a More button.
• People can now message Business pages.

And here’s what’s gone:

• Default landing tabs used by many businesses to create a Welcome tab are no longer available with the new Timeline design.

Check out this Facebook Cheat Sheet for the sizes you need to know. And look out for more soon on how Timeline impacts Facebook marketing for businesses.

LinkedIn Rolls Out Follow Company Button: Companies can now add a LinkedIn Follow button to their websites, “making it easier for any consumer on the web to begin following companies of interest on LinkedIn.”

Google+ Plugins Get Revamped: There are a couple of little changes to make it easier to share your content with the +1 button and follow Google+ business pages.  People can now create a personal Google+ badge for their web pages. And be sure to check out the new Google+ Style Guide for the recommended language to use when promoting your Google+ accounts.

The Google+ Style Guide shows you which Google+ icons to use and which ones not to use.

YouTube Captions Get More Options: Captions have been available for YouTube videos since 2006, but YouTube has been improving caption features. YouTube viewers can now get automatic captions in more languages, search videos with captions and modify how the captions look while viewing videos. And YouTube creators have more options to import files with closed captions to their YouTube channel.

You can search for text in Closed Captions on YouTube.

Facebook Launches “Facebook Offers” for Businesses: A few select businesses are testing Facebook coupons that appear in the Facebook feeds.  Facebook also unveiled mobile feed ads and logout ads.

Here’s a social media tool worth noting:

Skills.to: A place to tag yourself and your Twitter friends with endorsements for skills and search for people with the skills you need.

Check out Skills.to and see the skills people have.

Here’s an interesting infographic:

Who Really Uses LinkedIn?:

Find out more about LinkedIn users.

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner presents Social Media Success Summit 2012! (online conference).

Join 27 social media experts at Social Media Examiner’s big online conference! Go here to learn more.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.