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!

In the world of Twitter sometimes it would be a great idea to be able to attach a tweet with a physical location, so if someone tweets about a football game they can put it into context by also telling everyone where they are watching it from, perhaps a pub or even the football stadium. Each location will have its own twitter page, this will give you the ability to look and see who else is tweeting from the same location. This is a brand new feature that is being rolled out - so watch out for it and be sure to set up your page sooner rather than later.

In order to take advantage of this new feature you must make sure that in your Twitter settings you enable the Tweet with my location feature, once this is done and Twitter places is available to us here in the UK you will see under the box where you normally type a tweet the area where you can select a location. If the location isn't already there you can manually add the location that you want and mark it on the map for other users.

image taken from twitter help centre

How can this feature help businesses?

Well it could be quite neat if people tell you where they are and that they are in need of something, for example, when the users in the Empire State Building all started tweeting that they wanted an ice cream delivery the local chain Tasti D Lite was on hand to satisfy the desire!

Will this feature be used heavily, we're not sure at this stage, there maybe privacy concerns about giving out ones location at a given point in time, but we'll be watching this space eagerly as location sharing (just look at the popularity of Foursquare) does seem to be coming a mainstream activity.

These days with the introduction of Social Media everyone should be monitoring their business, brand and personal name to ensure that they are alerted to what is being said in the online world.

Google alerts is a free service that brings this information directly into your inbox, or to Google Reader depending on our choice. As well as monitoring your own information, Google alerts can also monitor keywords that you might want to keep a check on, so it will basically alert you to anything that you have put in as your topic.

The alert will give you a brief summary of the post and then link you to the original piece so that you can go and check it out. - A good tip is to make sure that your phrases you enter are inside quotes so that you reduce the amount of non-related alerts that you get.

Alerts are great for

• Monitoring your own brand and company
• Monitoring what your competitors are up to
• Finding new information to include in your Social Media content
• Monitoring where your Press Releases are showing up (although typically this only happens if you get your Press into Google News)