**Note: This is a guest post written by one of our readers. For more information on how to submit a guest post, please read our guest posting guidelines.

Those crazy guys at Facebook just love to play around, and they’ve recently made another whole new bunch of changes for the rest of us to get our heads around.

Fortunately for us entrepreneurs, they are mostly beneficial!

Let’s take a look at the 3 biggest changes and how you can use them to your advantage on your Facebook business pages.

Promoted Posts

It’s always been the case that content you post on your Page doesn’t get seem by ALL your fans (sources at Facebook tell us that only 16% of the content business pages actually gets seen).

But now Facebook is allowing you to pay a small amount to guarantee that a greater number of your fans will see your posts by displaying them more prominently on newsfeeds. This will help you successfully engage with more of your fans, more often.

Important: This feature isn’t designed to get you new fans. Posts are only promoted to your EXISTING fans, and appear in their news feed in just the same way as a regular post. What you’re paying for is a much higher percentage of your fans seeing your content.

Setting up a promoted post is easy, you simply click the “promote” button that appears next to the “post” button when you’re adding new content to your Page. You can set your own budget of between $10-30 and your promotion will run for 3 days – and best of all you’re only charged when people actually view your post!

Promoted posts have three major benefits

1. They’re cost-effective
2. They’re low effort
3. You can measure results easily

The promoted posts feature is currently only available to pages with more than 400 ‘likes’.

For more details on promoted posts, see Facebook’s info here.

Scheduled Posts

No more having to physically sit in front of your PC and make real time posts. Facebook’s long awaited scheduled posts feature means you can now schedule your posts to be published in the future. You can now pick prime time slots for your posts and you don’t have to be there in person make it so – yay!

It’s straightforward to schedule a post too. Simply click the small clock icon next to the “post” button when you’re adding new content to your Page.

Admin Roles

An excellent update that allows you to choose what permissions to give to each admin you add to your Page. This means you have maintain control over your content where it’s needed, but you can also give others free rein to get creative with other aspects of your pages. This is perfect if you want an employee to take charge of posting stuff for your fans, but you don’t want them to accidentally delete anything!

Go to the new “Admin Roles” section of your Page’s settings to change roles for new or existing admins. You can see the different roles and their associated permissions here.

What Next?

It’s clear from these changes that Facebook that it’s prioritizing those businesses willing to pay for access to its audience.

However, the changes in this instance are actually genuinely useful (and low budget) and to gain the most for your business pages you should get using them straight away. Let us know what you think of the new options and if the promoted posts work for you.

About the Author

James makes small businesses bigger. He’s worked with some of the world’s largest brands and companies to market their products and services online – including Disney, Microsoft, 20th Century Fox, Virgin, Coca Cola, MTV and many others. Find out more and read business growth tips at http://www.JamesTNoble.com.

**Note: This is a guest post written by one of our readers. For more information on how to submit a guest post, please read our guest posting guidelines.

Facebook advertising is without doubt one of the most effective online marketing methods. Many business owners are aware of that, however, they are confused by the variety of ad unit options available to them. There are four types for advertisers to choose from: page post ads, page like ads, page post like ads and Facebook ads for pages. Facebook ads for pages and page post ads are considered to be Facebook standard ad units, while page like ads and page post like ads are variations of sponsored stories.

First thing you will need is to set up your account with Facebook and link it to a payment account. Advertisments can run at all hours of the day. Traditional accounts and credit card accounts that issue statements once a month are not a good idea as you will want to be monitoring your spending in real time. Open a simple account, with easy online access where you can watch every move, and where you can easily top up online. Click here for a look at what kind of accounts are suitable.

Page post ads are often confused with Facebook ads for pages due to the similarities between the two. With Facebook ads for pages, you have full control over your target audience. You could choose to direct the user to your fan page or to another website unrelated to Facebook. You could choose to show ads to your fans, non-fans, everyone, people with specific interests and many other demographic criteria.

Page post ads do not enable the advertiser to have full control over how his ads will appear and the target audience for his ads. The title of the ad is the title of your page. The content of the ad will be the item shared on your wall. And the image of the ad will be your page’s profile photo.

Choosing the right type of ads will help you reach out to your target audience, increase your brand’s online presence, boost conversion and traffic to your targeted page. Depending on your goal and market sector, you should choose the type of ad unit that fits both your budget and target audience. Sponsored stories are highly targeted, but they may be quite limiting if the page being promoted is not popular enough. If your page already has great user interaction activities, then page post ad should be your choice.

About the Author:

Guest post contributed by Alan Wiser. Alan is a freelance writer. He consults small businesses on their social media needs.

You just started your business’ Facebook page and start to wonder: How do I keep these fans engaged and interested in my page? This can be a problem for many small businesses, mainly because 95 percent of users never switch their newsfeed from “Top News” to “Most Recent”, according to the official Facebook blog.

All Business and No Play Makes for a Boring Page

You Don’t Always Have to Lead

Don’t Forget Media

Know Your Audience

Here are some important points to consider if you’re thinking of using Facebook to draw traffic to your web site.

1. Make sure your business goals match the platform.

Facebook advertising isn’t particularly useful for direct sales, unless you happen to be selling exactly what people want. Social network users tend to be a fickle bunch, and your margin for error is going to be pretty slim if you want them to buy today. Groupon and other “deals” web sites have seen some success with direct sales, since getting a bargain never goes out of style. However, the real opportunity is list-building. If you use Facebook ads to grow your list of fans or your e-mail list, you’re much more likely to be successful. In this type of campaign, the goal is to get someone’s permission to market to them in the future rather than convincing them to buy from you today.

2. Utilize the demographic segmentation features.

The ability to pick and choose where your ads will be displayed, to whom, and at what time of day is the real meat of the Facebook platform. To make full use of this feature, you may consider creating different ads to to display to different groups of people. For example, if you sell football jerseys, you might display an ad to people in Dallas showing a Cowboys shirt during the week before the Cowboys play. Whatever you do, don’t use Facebook to display the same generic ads to everyone. You’ll miss the whole point of advertising on Facebook this way.

3. Log in at least once a day.

As your campaign runs, pay attention to the number of impressions and clicks on each of your ads. If you’ve set up multiple ads, pay attention to which ones are getting the most views and clicks. The results may surprise you. Remember, with Facebook campaigns, you have the ability to adjust quickly if you notice that something isn’t performing as expected.

Facebook advertising takes elbow grease, just like anything else. While it does represent a good opportunity for your business, understand that you will be putting some time into it – or paying someone a premium price to manage it for you.

The Facebook Marketing Book by Dan Zarrella and Alison Zarrella takes a look at how Facebook has changed over the years since its development back in 2004 and follows its evolution into one of the most (if not the most) powerful marketing tool available to businesses and individuals alike.

Chapter by Chapter Breakdown

The book is broken down into 12 different chapters:

1. Introduction to Social Networking
2. Facebook Profile Basics
3. Facebook Page Basics
4. Facebook Group Basics
5. Facebook Events
6. Facebook Application Basics
7. Customizing Your Facebook Page
8. Developing a Facebook Content Strategy
9. Cross-Promoting Content on Facebook
10. Facebook Page Management
11. Advertising on Facebook
12. Analytics and ROI

Zarrella and Zarrella are certainly more than capable of being trusted as credible resources for writing a book that deals with Facebook as they both have extensive experience in the social media and writing market. Of special interest to online marketing experts will be Chapters 7 and 8, which detail how to customize a Facebook fan page in order to appeal to a target audience.

Long has it been assumed that Facebook is “something for the kids” to engage in. In fact, Facebook now spans a much wider audience than most traditional media can even hope to reach. Similar to Twitter, Zarrella and Zarrella point out that Facebook goes well beyond simply knowing how to set up an attractive profile page. Rather, the key to finding success with this particular social network is INTERACTION.

Whether you are creating “groups” for your fan page, users can take advantage of all of the free features that Facebook provides. For instance, longer Facebook icons provide more room for branding right on your Facebook fan page! And because the page icon is the first thing that people will see, you will want to make sure that you represent your brand as well as you can. Zarrella and Zarrella recommend a “perfect” icon size as being around 200 pixels square or a longer icon that is 600 pixels high by 200 pixels wide (pp. 135).

A Word About Facebook Tabs

Zarrella and Zarrella also strongly recommend taking advantage of Facebok Tabs. In order to do this, you may need to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with FBML (Facebook Markup Language) OR, you may want to invest some money into hiring a professional designer to develop some custom Facebook tabs and/or Facebook applications. The bottom line here is all about improving the functionality, look and feel for your potential Fans.

In addition to all of the aforementioned, making sure that you have FRESH CONTENT every day is important. It lets fans know that you’re alive and that you are an active Facebook user who is open to comments, suggestions and the like. Offering EXCLUSIVE stuff to those who are your Facebook fans is a great way to make fans feel special while improving upon your branding.

In future posts, we’ll come back to Zarrella and Zarrella regarding Facebook; but for now, definitely make sure you grab a copy of their new book, The Facebook Marketing Book. It offers some really valuable insight into what’s currently going on in the world of social media and social networking, and for just under $14, you can’t find a better deal.

Maybe and maybe not. Let’s ask some different questions. Feel free to use this same logic for LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare, or pretty much anything else.

I’ve noticed that the “herd” mentality starts to come into play more with social media than with other things. The reason seems simple. Most people don’t really understand it, but everybody seems to be doing it. Plus, it’s free. The innate human tendency: when in doubt, follow the crowd.

Not every business is on the internet. In fact, there is still a huge segment of the population that doesn’t particularly like computers and prefers to use them as little as possible. I hear generalized statements like “everybody’s going to the internet these days – that’s where you have to be!” I think to myself, “not necessarily.” Not everyone thinks the same way.

If you’re considering putting up a Facebook page for your business, you’d do best to keep this in mind. While you don’t have to pay for a Facebook page (at least not yet), time is money. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Why (specifically) do you think your business would benefit from being on Facebook?
2. What specific measurable goal do you believe that you can achieve on Facebook that you can’t achieve anywhere else?
3. 90 days now, how will you determine whether your idea proved to be correct or not?
4. How much time per week are you willing to commit to spend learning how to use Facebook for your business?
5. Do you know of any businesses like yours that are currently making more money because they use Facebook?

You might think that just because it doesn’t cost any money, you have nothing to lose. The risk, when it comes to free things like Facebook, is spreading your time too thin. When you see a way for Facebook to produce measurable results (preferably direct revenue), you’re ready to pull the trigger.

If you’re not clear about how Facebook will make you money, but you still want to start playing around with it anyhow, that’s fine. Just do it on your personal time and don’t think of it as a business activity.

Recently, I was watching the news when I saw a story break about a man who was being charged with several counts of child abuse. As the story progressed, a picture of the man’s granddaughter with her children were put on public display for all of the viewers in the world to see, and do you know where the photo came from?

Her Facebook profile picture.

It wasn’t that long ago that I had actually gone through and deleted all of the pictures that I had uploaded to my Facebook account over the years. Granted, none of the images that I had on my profile were anything that I would be ashamed of if it made its way to the general public, but as more and more news stories keep breaking over social sites like Facebook, I cannot help but wonder whether our narcissism is giving way to an unforeseen backlash in the usage of social networking. Some things worth considering with many Facebook users include:

• Befriending people you barely know.
• Others can monitor pictures that you post of yourself and others.
• Status updates are really updates about your latest plans, relationship statuses, achievements and travels.
• Selecting “Like” for a page, group, link or status serves to inform others about your personal opinions, etc.

All of it seems to make it incredibly easy for criminals, stalkers and predators to track your every move. Not only this, but if you think that you’re safe from it all simply because you made your profile “private,” think again. There are numerous Facebook complaints, debates and ongoing discussions surrounding privacy problems, issues surrounding the fact that you can never really “delete” your account and rumors swelling around the fact that once you put information on your profile, it stays in the system.

So, what can you do? The following are 5 tips towards being a safer Facebook user:

1. Control your image. Sure, you might have had a good time with your friends at that party in high school, but that’s no excuse for making it your profile picture. Remember what happened to the woman above? You never know who has access to websites as well as who might be able to hack into a site. Therefore, keep it modest.
2. Keep private information private. If something is going on in your life or if you have personal information, DON’T SHARE IT. You’re just making it that much easier for thieves and scammers to nab you.
3. Don’t post personal information. If you’re planning on meeting up with someone, don’t make your plans on Facebook (or any other social networking site for that matter). Instead, send a private email or place a phone call.
4. Take things at face value. Don’t believe everything that people say on social networking sites/the Internet. The online world is different than actual face-to-face interaction, and the virtual world makes it easier for folks to say or write things that they probably wouldn’t say to your face.
5. Restrict access to your profiles. On Facebook, I’ve restricted access so that I am not searchable. Additionally, I only use it for personal reasons. I’ve purposely chosen to keep my friends list small, and only befriend those people who I actually know or who are my family members.