Facebook have decided to change the width of their business page fbml 'landing' pages and are also finally going to be removing the boxes tab (this has been talked about for ages!) The new width of the page is going to be 520 pixels wide, and you will have until 23rd August to get yours sorted. As this is a lot slimmer than the previous version most landing pages will have to be redesigned to take this into consideration.

You can see how our new page will look after the changes have been made, the right handside will be missing!

make sure you go and change yours now to save embarrassment later!

Another couple of new things that we though we would bring your attention to, the first is

Parature for FaceBook

As Facebook has become the 'goto' place for conversation between brands and their consumers, it is now starting to turn into the place where a community and collaboration can also be created. 

Parature enables you to monitor your Facebook wall easily to manage the marketing messages and general customer service, but what Parature also offers, which is really neat, is the ability to allow your fans to search your knowledgebase, submit customer service tickets and talk to customer service agents all from within Facebook - so turning it into a customer service portal.

This is a great application for supplying your clients with that 'multi-channel' experience that many users are now demanding. For more information you can hop over to the Parature for Facebook website or their fan page

the second tool is a newly launched service called Booshaka, this is the place to go to see what is trending on Facebook right now!! You can search by category type, or by keyword. This is invaluable if you are a marketer, you can watch out for what is important to people today. You can filter by whats trending now, what got the most 'buzz' or most recent and the tool obviously gives you the option to share that information. like or discuss it.  Great new tool to help filter out whats important!

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You'll have noticed that last month Facebook changed the "Become a Fan" button to "Like", and instead of the Fanpage the area for your business is now called an official page or business page. In addition to this update Facebook also announced the new 'like' button that has been designed to spread the Facebook authority around the web. The Like button you will see is situated on the top of your business page, but also its available as a widget that you can place on 'external' websites to Facebook.

If you install the like button onto your website or blog, then whether the visitor to your page is connected to Facebook or not, if they click the button then it will attach their online identity to your page. As with everything online this simple action will create a record that can be visible to the visitor’s social network as it will display as a profile update.

So in doing this simple action you are now linking your website to the Social networks via your visitors – Twitter and the Social Bookmarking buttons will do the same for you.

On to the teccie bit, there are two ways to put the like button on your page, through an i-frame or as a piece of javascript. Our preferred method is using the javascript code (you can find the code here) as this ensures that your visitors will

1. know if any of their friends have liked your page (their profile pictures will appear) 
2. They can comment as to why they like your page which will appear in their status update.

As you know peer recommendation is great for expanding your business, our advice, go to the developers page and add the code to your site.

If your business is not on facebook then you're missing a big trick...

Over the past year Facebook has increased its visitors by 185% and during the last couple of months it has peaked as the most visited site in the US, compare this with Googles 9% growth and you'll see that Facebook is a force to be reckoned with.

We were staggered when we saw this chart of the day from business insider

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This really does prove that if you want your business to be where the people are Facebook is the place to be seen, Set yourself up a Fan Page and get those fans raving about your services. (you can find our Fan Page here - please do become one!!)