Facebook Fan pages are getting an updated layout and several new features to help you engage with your fans. A lot of what you see on the new Profile page layout has been carried over which makes it easy to transition between the two, but the improved functionality and control that comes with the new Page layout is what I am most excited about. Here’s some of what you’ll be getting: Notifications when fans interact with your page or posts; A place to showcase photos along the top of your page; A news feed for your page; The ability to Like and post on other pages as your page (FINALLY).

Preview your page and you’ll be given the option to upgrade early. All pages will automatically be upgraded on March 10, so why wait? Upgrade now – here is a “tour” to guide you through the changes…

The folks over at DCWEEK have announced this year’s event dates! DCWEEK 2011 will take place in Washington DC, November 4-11, 2011.

“DCWEEK is a festival in the US capital focused on bringing together designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators of all kinds. It’s a series of 100s of distributed events powered by the community and complemented by core conferences, parties, and projects created by the festival organizers iStrategyLabs and Tech Cocktail. DCWEEK 2010 was assembled in 3.5 months and drew 6,000 attendees from around the world.”

How much is too much? At what point do we overwhelm our websites with links to, lets be honest, 3rd party sites? Are we driving users away from the very place we purport to use social media to drive them to?

In previous articles we have shown you how to add Facebook Like and Share buttons to your site and how to embed a Tweet button on your site – you can even see our Twitter feed on the right of this blog and retweet or share on Facebook this article from links below (we hope you do)! We are obviously big fans of engagement through social media, and while perhaps we need to take it a step further on our own site (stay tuned for our forthcoming redesign), I think some people might be taking it too far.

Online video watching is steadily increasing among all user demographics. Below you will find some statistics from a survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Following our recent articles on Generations Online in 2010 – Statistics, Who’s Online? A look at Who Is, and How People Are, Accessing the Internet, and Twitter Statistics and Info on Usage, we now present part of the findings of a survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project on social networking site usage across the generations.

Facebook is looking to encourage user check-ins through their Places feature by providing brick and mortar stores with a new (and currently free) viral marketing opportunity through “Deals”. Deals allows you to create special deals on Facebook through a claimed Facebook Place – meaning you have to have claimed a Place to begin with. It can be managed through your Fan Page, and there are different types of deals you can create based on your needs. Read on for a visual walk through on how to create a Deal.

A new social marketing tool was launched over the Thanksgiving holiday – just in time for the shopping frenzy that is the Holiday season. And as today is “Cyber Monday”, (or the monday after “Black Friday”) I thought it would be a good time to do a write up to introduce you to the fledgling site and clever tool that is GoPromoIt.com.

If you use a management tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite or Cotweet than you can already post simultaneously (and independently) to both your Facebook and Twitter Accounts. But for the casual user, being able to link your Twitter to your Facebook Profile OR a Page may be helpful. There are two ways this link can go: 1) Auto post all Twitter posts (excluding DMs and @replies) to your Facebook Page or Profile; 2) Auto post all Facebook posts, photo uploads, notes, etc to Twitter.

This guide will walk you through: Auto Posting your Twitter Updates to Facebook.

The buzz is out about Facebook’s new SPAM filter feature on Pages, and while its not visible to everyone yet, it does seem to be rolling out quickly. “Facebook is now helping Page admins ensure that the most valuable content posted by users on their Page wall is more visible to anyone viewing the Page. We are now offering automatic content filtering on Page walls that will ensure that posts soliciting spam are removed from public view as well as ensure that posts containing good content remain more visible.” (from Facebook)

While perusing the Captico Twitter feed this morning, I ran across a tweet about a pocket projector being promoted by our friend @bullseyevideo (actually 3 tweets… but that just means he really wants it, right?). And since pocket projectors are AWESOME, and shwag is usually free (also called: swag, schwag; its the stuff companies hand out at trade shows with their brand name on it) I decided to investigate.