Facebook is currently in the process of rolling out a number of physical and stylistic changes to their Business Pages. These changes impact the pages’ public appearance, and how Admins interact with page functions.  While many feel that these changes make Business Pages look more like a personal profile, the essential page controls and functionality should remain relatively unchanged. Here are a few of the changes: Outward Facing Changes Appearance Both Admin functionality and overall design changes available with the new Facebook Business Pages. The new pages use the same size photographs as existing Business Pages, so you won’t need to resize all your photos as you did with past updates. However, the new layout features a left-justified profile picture, which may impact clients whose pages are designed to have a purposeful contrast or relationship between their cover and profile photos. Additionally, the new pages display the Page name in white text on the cover photo, so clients may want to update any light-colored cover photos to provide a better background. Page Design Most business information appears on the left side of the new pages, (under the profile picture), while the news feed and wall postings are combined into a single-column stream on the right. The left column information includes phone number, website, photos, videos and a map showing business location. The new design prominently displays total number of Likes, along with thumbnail links to friends of the viewer who also like the page. Facebook Apps are prominently accessible on the left side of the page, underneath the business description and above page photos. Three thumbnails get main-page treatment, with a “See all” connection option for app-heavy pages. The right-side column displays all news-related content like status updates, wall posts and comments. Scrolling ‘Like’ Bar One of the more exciting additions is the scrolling ‘Like’ bar, which should help increase engagement. Visitors who haven’t yet liked a business page will see a small white “header” row that stays on the top of the page, prompting the visitor to Like the page, and allowing him or her to do so without scrolling all the way back to the top. This should hopefully help increase likes and engagements as more visitors interact with content. Once the visitor likes a page, the scrolling bar disappears from his or her screen.  Inward Facing Changes  Authorship Attribution When viewing a page as an Admin, you can now see which Facebook admin posted each previous update. For Engage121 users, all updates made through the Engage121 application – regardless of who actually makes the post - will be attributed to the Facebook user who connected the page to the Engage121 application. In the example shown here, a post is attributed to “Ryan Hayes” – who connected the page to Engage121 – even though any number of other users with Admin privileges could have made the post. The quick takeaway here for users is that “Posted by” lines, for at least the moment, will continue to [...]

Engage121 Inc.'s London office to host a session during social media week this September, titled "Can retail brands mirror the success of some independent stores by becoming more local with social?" The High Street is dead so Mary Portas tells us, ‘The days of a high street populated simply by independent butchers, bakers and candlestick makers are over', and ‘the major supermarkets and malls have delivered highly convenient, needs-based retailing, which serves today's consumers well. Is that true? Are the days of the independent gone and do supermarkets and malls serve us well? The number of stores closed by high street chains in the UK in 2012 was ten times the number of the year before. HMV, Dixons, Monsoon, Woolworths, Blockbuster, Jessops, Republic, and now Dreams are gone or closing stores. 1,779 last year, in 2012. That's seven million square feet of space. But for the last two years, there has been a rise in the number of small independents. Besides, in a bid to attract more customers to visit these independent stores, the services of construction companies west midland or in other locations could act as a vital helping hand. Store refurbishment, interior finishing work, and increased ease of navigation, not to mention improving and adding space to existing buildings could work in favor of independent store owners by encouraging more visitors, which might be one of the reasons that they are able to sustain the accelerated move of the retail market to digital spaces and stores. In 2011 – there were 2,500 more independent shops opened than were closed down. We believe it's not the high street that dead – it's the clone town, where every street in the country looks the same and national retailers churn out the same message without tailoring it to their local community. So here's the challenge - Can global or big retail brands avoid the store closures of many household names and mirror the success of some independents by becoming more local with social? Engage121's speakers will inform and hold discussions with our audience in order to get to the bottom of this topic. Come and Join us and tell us what you think! To find out more about attending this event please click here for more details    

This week's Social Media Recap has multiple updates from multiple social networks. Facebook has made embedded posts available to all users as of this week. Facebook has also added a search tool to their poke feature making it easier to find people you want to poke. LinkedIn has launched University Pages. A LinkedIn spokesperson said it's "the first step towards a longer vision to help students, parents, and university faculty get a head start on career mapping." LinkedIn also redesigned their Group Pages this week. Hopefully this will help people connect more with their peers and potential business contacts. They can also do this by checking out how they can buy Linkedin likes to help with their digital status, as well as look into how else they can promote their influence online that may lead to job offers and further connections. Twitter added context to tweets by attaching related headlines to help you follow conversations on twitter easier. They also brought Tweetdeck back from the dead with new functionality. Unforuntely, while launching their new updates they suffered a security breach from a hacker. Make sure you revoke access to all 3rd party apps that are connected to your Twitter account. If you are an organization that deals with a large workforce or management of sensitive data, there are many advantages of hiring computer security specialists, cyber essentials plus will perform every method of scanning for malware and viruses within their arsenal to see if newer forms of malware have wormed their way into the infrastructure. At https://indexsy.com/best-cybersecurity-companies/ you will find the most famous cybersecurity companies today. Small business cybersecurity software can stop cyberattacks on your business in their tracks, saving your company invaluable time and money. What did you discover this week?

This week's Social Media Recap is chock-full of news! YouTube co-founders have launched a new video app, MixBit, which lets you record 16 seconds of video, edit and format the content. However all content you upload is public for others to remix and use so be careful of what you record! Instagram now lets you upload videos from your photo library, you no longer have to record your video in the app. It seems that uploaded videos can be longer than 30 seconds in length, which is great news. Facebook has made changes to it's newsfeed algorithm again and for once they're using fancy names to promote the changes. Story Bumping & Last Actor are supposed to make it so you see more of the updates you want to see in your newsfeed. This should be good news for Business Pages. Twitter launched photo galleries in search, and LinkedIn updated it's mobile app to allow you to apply to jobs directly in the app. Is your head spinning yet?

You might have spent an enormous amount of time finding the right information on "How to start a nonprofit in Texas" or "How to start a financial or law firm" in the city you reside in so that you feel prepared. Then there are those of you that have even taken your business idea one step further by starting to look into where you can find a patent attorney to help you patent your idea so that others are unable to copy it. Some of you may have put all of the resources that you have into getting a physical structure from which your business can be based and you need to know the next step from there. Or perhaps you already have an established business and are starting to feel a slump. Things seem to be changing in a way you aren't able to predict and you don't know where to go from there without a business consulting outsider's perspective. Whatever your situation is right now, no matter your experience, whether you are looking for solar eCommerce marketing strategies, or trying to spread the word about your handmade candles, social media marketing can help. Have you considered using social media to market your business? Have you thought about how you can use it to attract customers and market your business? If not, you should. Social media marketing along with quality content marketing can change the outlook of your business. Consider getting in touch with an inbound marketing agency to improve your search engine rankings through valuable content creation. It can be a challenge to figure out how to use social media to market your local business without choosing to outsource a white label website designer. This particular quote outlines it quite nicely: "Even though small business owners understand how important social media is to their success, for the most part it's still a theoretical understanding. They're not taking advantage of social media's full potential." says best Selling author Steven D. Strauss That's where Engage121 comes in. Engage121 helps companies and small businesses use Social Media for its true business potential – building local audiences and local business opportunities. For the past 4 years, we have focused our efforts on small businesses, and organizations with multi-location presences. Examples of the firms we focus on are franchise businesses, dealerships, brokerages, banks & branches, non-profits with chapters, and any other hub-and-spoke organization that recognize the leverage they possess in building brand and driving sales with their local outlets using social media. Today, Engage121 is enhancing our service with the release of v1.1 of our Local Social solutions (we call it "OA3"). Our latest version launches today with the following new features and additions: Hot Content Impact Scores - to help users identify the content that is more likely to be of interest to their community Google+ integration - for improved SEO and broader cross-posting FourSquare integration– one of the original, and still one of the best, local platforms Monitor Consumer Review Sites, [...]