With over 300 million active users worldwide, and nearly 100 million in the US alone, Facebook can be a good platform for those wanting to grow their consulting business. While there are other social platforms for meeting new contacts or building your professional reputation, like LinkedIn or Twitter, Facebook offers a variety of ways for consultants to authentically market themselves to target contacts and customers.

Because it’s a place where people play social games, post personal photos, and live out their real lives, it can sometimes lead to better connections than you could find elsewhere. Maybe you and a friend of a friend will get in a discussion about a move all of you like, and that will lead to more conversation…. and eventually a business contract?

But using Facebook for network requires nuance and sensitivity. Here’s our list of 9 Facebook best practices for consultants.

Privacy

Make parts of your profile public – Facebook started out as a private site, but it has increasingly added features that let you make more of your identity public to any Facebook user — partly to be more competitive against other, more inherently public sites. This benefits any consultant trying to get their name out through the site. You can set your Facebook profile to be partially public. Go to Settings in the top navigation bar, select Privacy Settings in the dropdown menu, then you’ll see a few different options for what parts of your profile you can make public, including your basic profile, your basic info, your personal info, education info, work info, etc. We recommend that you make as much open as you feel comfortable sharing, but if nothing else at least your work info if you want people to know about your consulting job.

Make your profile searchable – Opening up parts of your profile is fine for other people looking Facebook, but there’s another step to take if you want people to find out about you from the web. Create and customize a publicly-searchable Facebook profile. The search subsection within Privacy Settings doesn’t let you display work info, but it does let you display your friends list, various types of Facebook pages that you’re a fan of, and more. For anyone searching for you, this is a good way to give them some clues about your focus.

Decide what to keep private – Two other options in Privacy Settings also deserve some attention. One, News Feed and Wall, lets you decide which types of stories will be visible to people when they visit your profile wall, and which will appear within their News Feeds. For example, you can chose to show or hide stories about edits you make to your profile, posts you leave on discussion boards, and people you’ve just added as friends. Also, if you have a secret addiction to social games or other Facebook applications, you may want to keep that private. If you’re a consultant with a score of 160 in Mafia Wars, for example, a client may wonder when you’re getting any work done. Here’s more about privacy settings for applications.

Networking

Post public status updates about your professional expertise – One of the options you can choose in privacy settings is if you want to make your status updates private. If you’re spending a lot of time updating about your line of work, we recommend that you make these public. This way, anyone can search Facebook and, if they’re in the same field as you, friend you and see what you’re up to. That won’t always generate leads, but it will more often than keeping your status updates private. Also, of course, if you’re posting about work, you may strike up conversations that show up friend’s news feeds — their friends may see this and want to take a look at what you’re talking about, as well. One note, of course, is that you shouldn’t be talking about specific clients here if you’re supposed to be keeping your work with them confidential.

Make “friends” in your industry – From its roots as a network just for college campuses, Facebook has grown to become a part of people’s lives in the workplace. The decision to become friends with someone in your industry should be carefully thought out. If you’re posting crazy party photos from your weekends on Facebook, you may not want those showing up in the news feed of a new client who friended you. Depends what industry you’re in, of course. If you’re involved in event promotion, maybe you want as many of those photos on the site as possible. More importantly, making friends in your industry can help you learn about who your friends are friends with. Sometimes, you’ll find that friends from work and friends from other parts of your life know each other — and you’d never know to ask them about those connections except for what you learn from Facebook friends lists. Protocol is a personal decision in some cases here. You may want to ask friends for a direct introduction. Or, you may just want to message a potential friend out of the blue. If you feel comfortable being aggressive on this front, we also recommend searching Facebook for other people’s status updates, then messaging and friending them if they look interesting.

Join and participate in relevant Pages and groups — Thousands of companies have pages, now, and any sort of topic probably has at least one Facebook group about it. Use the search feature on Facebook to explore all of these, see what your friends are in. You don’t want to go ranting and spamming away, though. Try to focus your comments and likes on things that other people will consider valuable. Remember that pages you join will show up in your public search results — also something to think about when you decide what pages not to join.

Promotion

Create a page for yourself or your company – This is pretty obvious, but a page is specifically designed for letting you share information with the public. Pages show up in web search results, allow integration with Twitter and other sites, and can generally serve as the public venue for your consulting operation — and yes, they’re what you should use if you’re not comfortable sharing your personal profile in the ways we’ve listed.

Create a group for areas you focus on – Facebook groups are not designed to be commercial promotions; for example, you can’t publish into the News Feed through a group, but you can send message blasts as long as your group has less than 5,000 people. Instead, groups are what you should use if you want to do some good old-fashioned community building. We suggest creating a group specifically if you want to generate an ongoing conversation about a topic. If your real goal is just to promote yourself, it’s probably better to just use a page. Also, if there are already groups that address your focus area, we recommend joining those and engaging instead of trying to start your own.

Use Facebook Ads – The site’s ads can be targeted very specifically to users of different age groups, companies, and other interests. We recommend testing these ads out using very specific terms, trying for small buys and expanding if you’re finding them useful. There are enough free features on Facebook, however, that buying ads is a more advanced step to take. Also, if you’re serious about your Facebook page, we recommend using these ads to promote it. Think creatively about how to reach your target audience through Facebook Ads’ targeting parameters — you may find them effective.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with Facebook Marketing Service Provider Directory, and the rest of our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

Over the last week, we’ve watched as Sarah Palin and Newsweek have fought a battle of words over the magazine’s controversial cover image choice of Palin – with the battlefield being Facebook Pages. What is especially interesting is that both Palin’s and Newsweek’s Pages have seen significant bumps over the last two weeks – in Newsweek’s case at least, we believe this is in large part due to this controversy. Here’s some background and stats.

Sarah Palin, who has been using Facebook heavily to grow her fan base since last fall, has a new book out called “Going Rogue.” The book and its associated tour have not only been a boost for Palin supporters, it’s helping attract people to Palin’s Facebook Fan Page as well, with the page passing the one million Fan mark last week. For a national figure and former VP candidate, this popularity isn’t too surprising.

You may remember that Mrs. Palin gave John McCain a big bump in the polls when she joined the ticket last year – apparently, she can provide the same kind of bump for Facebook Fan Pages (especially when controversy is involved).

According to our PageData stats, prior to November 10, Newsweek’s Facebook Page had pretty flat growth for such a recognized brand, only gaining 2,100 Fans in the previous two weeks to sit at just over 40,000 Fans. The following day, November 11, the Page nearly matched that two week growth in a single day, gaining 2,000 Fans. In total, Newsweek’s Fan Page has gained over 58,000 new Fans with last week’s growth at 34,195 (or +52.96% – see chart below).

If all of this growth on both Pages had just happened as an indirect result of all of the exposure of this controversy, it would have been worth noting in and of itself, but there is another layer to this story – both sides have used their Facebook Pages as their choice medium to fight this battle.

On November 16, Mrs. Palin used her Facebook Page to respond to what she found to be a tasteless choice by Newsweek:

The following day, Newsweek – which is using the Palin cover as its Fan Page profile photo – then wrote a blog post pointing out that, “Palin denounced it—and us—to her million-strong Facebook following last night.”

What’s really interesting here is that Newsweek only wrote this response after Palin went directly to her Fans, even though there was plenty of other commentary on the issue prior to this (Newsweek of course also posted this on their Fan Page). Newsweek.com has integrated a Facebook Connect widget on the site.

Facebook Pages and Politics

When we look back on this episode, we might see this unfolding of events as a turning point where Fan Pages began to become the first choice online to rally the troops and put out a message. Even though Facebook’s recent News Feed redesign has throttled down the reach of less engaging feed stories, the potential reach and impact that posting to a Facebook Page has can be tremendous, and broader in many cases than is possible on Twitter or your own website. Add in recent tweaks such as Page owners being able to target Fans by language and location, and it looks like future “discussions” like this one could increasingly take place on Facebook Pages.

There are three main categories of large applications on Facebook: social games, quizzes, and apps that analyze Facebook data to tell you interesting factoids about you and your friends. And on this week’s list of the top 20 fastest-growing applications from AppData, we have all three, although quiz apps have a weaker showing today than they have in recent weeks — perhaps because so many games grew especially fast versus last week?

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	15,958,135	+6,719,437	+42.11
2.	FarmVille	66,841,884	+2,235,168	+3.34
3.	Happy Pets	2,944,542	+2,074,404	+70.45
4.	Moment Of Truth	1,898,873	+1,527,845	+80.46
5.	friend.ly	5,528,493	+1,130,401	+20.45
6.	Café World	29,456,515	+1,015,513	+3.45
7.	Snowball Fight	1,282,695	+947,440	+73.86
8.	Zoo World	2,159,596	+856,129	+39.64
9.	Acımasız Gerçekler	1,282,717	+792,339	+61.77
10.	Champions Online	723,800	+723,726	+99.99
11.	QuizBone	3,727,785	+666,943	+17.89
12.	Happy Aquarium	27,711,859	+657,309	+2.37
13.	Fish Isle	670,536	+648,838	+96.76
14.	Island Paradise	6,709,636	+624,067	+9.30
15.	Diva Life	2,169,692	+579,915	+26.73
16.	Friend Quiz	6,612,565	+525,596	+7.95
17.	Daily Sex Chance	562,954	+525,164	+93.29
18.	Addict	520,295	+520,294	+100.00
19.	Fish Life	2,086,784	+474,936	+22.76
20.	Facebook for iPhone	18,125,967	+438,739	+2.42

At the top of the list is Zynga’s latest game, virtual aquarium simulation FishVille, which swollen by 6.72 million users over the past week to reach 16.0 million monthly actives. Behind it is the company’s FarmVille virtual farming game, which has consistently been adding new users even though it is already by far the largest third-party app on Facebook. It gained 2.24 million to reach 66.8 million monthly actives.

And then we have Happy Pets, the new game from CrowdStar. It grew by an impressive 2.07 million last week to reach 2.94 million. The first game to launch after CrowdStar’s big hit, Happy Aquarium, both the game and the developer look like new and serious contenders.

Then, we have Moment Of Truth, which asks you to provide yes or no answers about randomly-selected friends with questions like “Do you think Jean is hot?” This app was actually made with a white-label app creator called Application Builder (Create Your Own App), which explains why there’s a Turkish version also on today’s list, called Acımasız Gerçekler (“brutal facts,” according to Google Translate).

Others in the friend-data category include friend.ly and Friend Quiz — obviously, the quiz concept ties in nicely with any sort of service that tries to analyze Facebook relationships. So, also notable is QuizBone, another simple quiz-maker.

LOLapps continues to push out graphically-pleasing role-playing games, with a new one called Champions Online growing by all of its 723,000 users this past week, and Diva Life continuing to surge, too.

This summer, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus made headlines when he said that Zynga spent a “couple million dollars” on FarmVille’s launch on Facebook. At the time, we’d been heading from many developers that their Facebook Ads spends were ramping up. Now, we’re seeing the trend continuing, with no signs of slowing down any time soon. From what we hear, as many as 7 of Facebook’s top 10 performance advertisers are application developers.

Why is this happening now, when many originally thought that app-install advertising was just going to be a flash in the pan in the early days of the Facebook Platform? There’s a couple fundamental reasons:

1. Many social games are monetizing very well through virtual goods-based business models, and are spending behind their success.

In the early days of the platform, much of the CPI (cost per install) style ad spend came from developers who wanted to accelerate growth, even though they didn’t have the revenue to back it up. Now that more engaging and better monetizing apps have been developed, and the payments ecosystem has matured, improving monetization overall, many developers are now able to spend behind the projected lifetime values (LTV) of app users. Developers are willing to buy an infinite amount of installs as long as the CPI fits their models.

2. Facebook is tightening up viral distribution channels.

Since the Facebook Platform launched, Facebook has continually tweaked its viral channels in order to manage application spam and protect the user experience, while at the same time still providing enough value and opportunity to developers to keep them interested in building for the Platform. For applications that need to grow, these organic communication channels can provide great distribution, but even the best apps can only grow by so many percent per week.

Those that want to ramp up more quickly need to spend on either Facebook Ads or third party Facebook Platform ads from companies like RockYou, Cubics/Adknowledge, AdParlor, LifeStreet Media, SocialCash, and others. Given Facebook’s recent and upcoming changes to the News Feed, invitations, and notifications, advertising channels are becoming increasingly important ones for the largest developers.

Effects on the Platform Economy

Of course, developer bidding wars are good for Facebook’s bottom line, at least for now. Facebook has succeeded in making its paid channel a necessity for accelerating app growth. But there are other effects for the larger ecosystem as well.

1. Acceleration of ads tools ecosystem.

If you’re spending a million dollars a month on Facebook ads, chances are you want to get as sophisticated as you can with your spend as quickly as possible. In the past, everyone had to manage their Facebook Ads campaigns by hand. Now that the Facebook Ads API is enabling new tools that can manage bulk volumes of ads and optimize bids in real time, we expect developers to be many of the Facebook Ads API tools pioneers.

2. Other advertisers getting priced out in some audience segments.

If you’re a brand advertiser, it is getting harder to compete with developers who are spending more. We are hearing that, especially on the Facebook Platform, developers are now pricing out some “traditional” brand advertisers. This is partially due to the fact that developers are no longer able to share any data with Platform ad networks, so advertisers can’t spend as much as they used to for more targeted ads. Facebook changed its policies on data sharing with Platform ad networks this summer, prohibiting third party ad networks from being able to access user data.

Going Forward

The market is getting more saturated with developers and games, so eventually things are going to get more expensive. As more advertisers come online, prices will continue to rise, and as users get more inundated with app ads, conversion could fall. Nevertheless, both Facebook and Platform ad networks have to be pleasantly surprised with how healthy developer ad spending is at this point. It’s the main way Facebook is directly financially benefiting from the rise of social gaming – though more programs, like its in-house payments service and ad network, are still on the way.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

Two winter blockbusters were big gainers this week, with the 2012 and Twilight: New Moon Facebook Pages seeing strong growth. Building on last week’s numbers, Outback Steakhouse continued to bring in new fans with its Bloomin’ Onion promotion (which stops at the 500,000th fan, so only 13,000 or so onions left), whereas both Türk Bayrağı (the Turkish Flag Page) and Disney, while continuing to attract new fans, showed about flat growth week-on-week.

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Texas Hold’em Poker 4,497,527 +305,964 +7.30 2. Outback Steakhouse 486,491 +203,561 +71.95 3. Mafia Wars 5,814,092 +197,991 +3.53 4. Türk Bayrağı 1,883,007 +166,740 +9.72 5. Best Buy 1,006,338 +161,411 +19.10 6. Disney 2,271,860 +152,087 +7.17 7. 2012 548,339 +143,120 +35.32 8. Inglourious Basterds 297,370 +136,930 +85.35 9. Twilight 4,253,133 +133,612 +3.24 10. Modern Warfare 2 348,932 +125,507 +56.17 11. Big Prize Giveaways 2,005,789 +124,201 +6.60 12. New Moon: The Movie 860,713 +107,070 +14.21 13. The Sims 3 681,547 +103,198 +17.84 14. Verizon 386,884 +98,442 +34.13 15. South Park 3,070,497 +92,464 +3.10 16. Minnesota Vikings 275,662 +75,619 +37.80 17. George Lopez 898,236 +70,870 +8.57 18. Starbucks 5,099,602 +65,024 +1.29 19. Sarah Palin 1,051,276 +64,881 +6.58 20. ABC Family 25 Days of Christmas 102,932 +57,370 +125.92

Other notables include the games Modern Warfare 2 and The Sims 3, both of which had game launches this past week, and Best Buy and Sarah Palin’s official page, each of which passed the one million fans mark (Palin is touring to promote her new book and is also on the cover of Newsweek). Verizon’s page also saw a large boost in the last week  which isn’t too surprising considering that they are running some pretty popular TV ads right now around the Droid and the 3G coverage map (two spikes in new fans, however, might be from Facebook adding in unofficial pages).

Finally, at number 20 this week is ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas page, which apparently was launched on November 10, and has steadily grown to over 100,000 fans in just 12 days. This is a great example of a media company using a Page for a specific program (ABC is owned by Disney, and the Disney page is another star). From the page’s Wall, it seems as though most people are becoming Fans of the page because they are looking forward to the programming on ABC Family in December, but nonetheless, the page is well thought out, especially the Boxes section (which many Page owners don’t use very effectively). The Boxes tab contains some useful content including a link to buy the audio CD of all the holiday songs featured during the month, a link to the website, and an especially useful and nice touch is the full December program schedule, so Fans don’t miss one magical moment.

Last week, we covered two of the first tools built on the Facebook Ads API to come to market. Now, London-based TBG, who manages the Facebook accounts of some of Europe’s biggest brands, is announcing its own new Facebook Ads management console, called ONE Media Manager.

TBG’s new service lets advertisers use automated tools to manage their Facebook Ads campaigns, instead of having to manage everything manually. Before, whenever advertisers wanted to create, edit, start, or stop ads, they had to do so manually. Now, they can use TBG’s new tool to manage ads on a campaign or ad group level – and advertisers can optimize bids and daypart automatically. In addition, the tool allows advertisers to manage their spend on a CPA basis as well, not just the CPC or CPM options afforded by Facebook’s own self-serve interface.

According to Simon Mansell, Managing Director at TBG London, 35 customers will be going live by the end of this week, and some advertisers have seen over 10x improvements in campaign results in testing thus far. Mansell says the company will offer customers the options of licensing the tools for in-house use, or having TBG manage their spend.

Currently, TBG works with brands like Vodafone, Optical Express, and Experian’s Credit Expert in the UK. Mansell the company will soon be expanding its efforts in the US early next year.

Been busy this week? Missed a few headlines, and don’t want to sift through older content? For those that may have missed out, be sure to check out our Inside Social Games headlines from this past week – tracking the latest information in social games and platforms.

Monday, November 16, 2009

• Fish Life is Another Big Virtual Aquarium Game on Facebook
• CrowdStar’s New Happy Pets Game Sees Zynga-Like Growth
• How Big Will FishVille Get? It Already Has 9 Million Users, Mostly Gained Last Week
• Small Facebook Games See Solid Growth on This Week’s Top Gainers List

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

• As Playfish Becomes Part of EA, Deciphering Its Latest Moves
• Ghosts n’ Goblins: Can’t Beat It? Spend Some Money On Virtual Armor
• IF: Facebook and Twitter Go Live on Xbox 360
• Zynga Raises $15.2 Million At a $625 Million Valuation – Or Is This Old News?
• LOLapps Partners with Atari’s Cryptic Studios, Launches Champions Online on Facebook

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

• FishVille: A Marinated Review
• A Closer Look at RockYou’s Zoo World
• The 20 Games That Gained the Most Daily Active Users In the Past Week
• PlayStation 3 Gets Gaming Integration with Facebook

Thursday, November 19, 2009

• A Balanced Game: Finger Physics
• Hello Kitty Online, An MMO for a Younger Crowd, Is a Work In Progress
• Inside Virtual Goods: What Portion of Social Gaming Revenues Come From Offers?

Friday, November 20, 2009

• Twitter: Small Games for Simple Purposes
• Preview: Battle Punks from Gravity Bear
• Zynga Hits 200M Monthly Active Users on Facebook, Spreads Further with Mafia Wars Toolbar, FarmVille.com

While a number of games have graduated from our up-and-comers list to become apps with more than 1 million users, there are quite a few more to take their places.

At the top is Snowball Fight, a simple snowball-throwing app that encourages people to “throw snowballs” at each other to move up the rankings of snowball-throwers. It gained a big 637,000 to reach 825,000 this week — although this is maybe not so surprising given that the interface rigidly funnels users into “throwing snowballs.” Tis’ the season, apparently, as there’s another app called Snowball Fight! further down on the list.

The second on the list, Addict, has shown up before. It gives you a loosely described percentage score for how “addicted” you are to Facebook, based on how often you use site features. However, it appears to have been taken offline by Facebook. We’re not sure what’s going on here.

So let’s look at some of the especially interesting apps on today’s list. Band of Heroes is one, with 421,000 new users to reach 690,000. At number four, it is at the tail end of at least three role-playing games from LOLapps that have been making their way into the millions. The others have been Diva Life and Yakuza Lords. These games are part of a larger plan by the app developer to promote other types of video games, more here.

Another role-playing game, The Hierarchy, also continues to move up, reaching 363,000 by today.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Snowball Fight	824,535	+673,080	+81.63
2.	Addict	514,724	+514,723	+100.00
3.	Daily Sex Chance	444,855	+444,829	+99.99
4.	Band of Heroes	690,107	+421,478	+61.07
5.	Ask a Friend	350,991	+283,060	+80.65
6.	Fish Isle	289,447	+276,222	+95.43
7.	Bueno & Demonio ?	282,382	+252,452	+89.40
8.	Snowball Fight!	703,692	+249,455	+35.45
9.	What Type Of Girl Are you?	442,849	+222,721	+50.29
10.	The Hierarchy	363,281	+174,596	+48.06
11.	建立你的測驗	236,031	+160,080	+67.82
12.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	361,219	+159,941	+44.28
13.	BigPrize Giveaways	304,907	+140,828	+46.19
14.	WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?	366,713	+110,198	+30.05
15.	Gift Creator	604,934	+105,513	+17.44
16.	Photo Books	239,267	+102,636	+42.90
17.	What kind of mask do you wear?	488,801	+100,292	+20.52
18.	New Moon	171,334	+99,583	+58.12
19.	Concerts	510,984	+99,169	+19.41
20.	Happy Aquarium Community	827,213	+86,785	+10.49

And we should not neglect the non-English apps, besides the fact that we can’t really read most of them. There’s one called Bueno & Demonio ? which is a Spanish-language quiz app asking if you’re good or bad. There’s another called 建立你的測驗, which Google Translate tells us means “to build your tests.” It appears to be some sort of quiz app.

There’s a pretty neat French-language game, though, called Piou Piou contre les cactus. It’s a cheery, arcade-styel game where you control a flying rubber ducky that you navigate up and down a screen trying to dodge cactuses.

In terms of non-games, a photo-printing app called Photo Books made it on, as did an app made by Buddy Media for the Twilight: New Moon movie coming out soon. And so did iLike’s Concerts app.

And an interesting game-related one also showed up: Happy Aquarium Community, from CrowdStar. The developer appears to be building apps that are actually forums for Happy Aquarium and its other games, although we’re not exactly sure why.

With Thanksgiving less than a week away – and one week until Black Friday – brands, local businesses and non-profits can use their Facebook pages to get shoppers ready for the holiday season, promote Thanksgiving dinners, recipes and ideas, and even help feed their communities.

Brands

With the economy still struggling, many national brands, retailers and online sellers have decided to start their holiday pushes this year even before Black Friday. A few pages have launched promotions already, but they are tied more tied into the holidays and not specifically Thanksgiving.

Sears ran a promotion on their page until yesterday for Fans to be eligible to receive “VIP” notifications and offers via SMS for Black Friday, and Best Buy (which with over 150,000 new fans in the last week is only about 1,200 fans from a million) has two tabs devoted to holiday shopping already, but nothing that seems specifically about Thanksgiving.

Wal-mart also has two tabs for the holidays, one called “Holiday” for social shopping, and one labeled “Giving” that is aimed at supporting US troops and highlighting how Wal-mart gives back to the community, including feeding the hungry. The Food Network’s Page has a really nice tab dedicated to Thanksgiving that breaks down the parts of the feast and then links you off to The Food Network’s website for recipes.

Local Businesses and Non-Profits

Unlike many of the large brands, local businesses and non-profits are generally not lumping Thanksgiving into “the holidays” and are actually focusing on it as its own event. It’s no surprise that restaurants are especially keen on promoting their Thanksgiving dinners, as the Baker’s Drive-Thru in Southern California is doing with a sweepstakes to win one of 72 dinners, the Four Points Sheraton Ann Arbor has a dedicated Thanksgiving tab for their dinner, and the Big Fish Grill in Delaware and Moody’s Diner in Maine being other good examples of using Pages to rally local fans to dinner (if you’re near Waldoboro, Maine, Moody’s dinner is only $14.95 – take that, economy!).

Other interesting promotions that we found included a bank in Kentucky giving away a FlipCam, the band Underoath (which has 115,547 fans) giving away a $5 coupon off their t-shirts — this has generated 176 Likes and 40 comments, and a ski resort giving away passes to its opening weekend (the weekend after Thanksgiving) to new Fans.

Finally, a number of local non-profits and individuals are using Pages to help feed the hungry this Thanksgiving.

The Salvation Army San Diego will serve 2,000 Thanksgiving dinners, an individual is trying to feed 500 families, and a surfing shop is trying to gain support to feed kids.

Thanksgiving Page Trimmings

As we’ve seen, local seems to win out when it comes to Thanksgiving. Perhaps larger brands don’t see the value in separating Thanksgiving out of the rest of the holidays, and there is probably some wisdom in that. For local restaurants especially, if you are planning on serving dinner next Thursday, we highly suggest at the very least to do a Wall post about what you’re doing, and if you have a little more time, put up a dedicated Thanksgiving tab – even if you just list the event and menu, it may just be enough to entice people out of their living room for the afternoon.

Finally, if you just want to become a fan of Thanksgiving, here’s the unofficial Page.

Zynga has hit a new milestone on Facebook, and meanwhile, it has just launched a couple ways to increase its presence on the web: A stand-alone site for its hit game FarmVille and a new browser toolbar for Mafia Wars.

The San Francisco company now has more than 200 million total monthly active users on the site, according to AppData. This measure is slightly deceptive, as we don’t have a way to tell how many of users play more than one Zynga game — some large minority of these users are being counted more than once, especially as Zynga cross-promotes its games.

However, Zynga also currently has around 65 million daily active users, from our understanding. 61.3 million of those are on Facebook, according to AppData, so presumably the others are on its MySpace and iPhone applications.

If Facebook is clearly where Zynga is seeing the most usage, why would it launch a site and a toolbar for its games?

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