Email marketing first Constant Contact announced today that it had acquired NutshellMail, an fbFund REV company, which created condensed email alerts from social networks for users.

NutshellMail allows subscribers to receive customizable updates from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace on one email as often as they choose.

After 10 years of email/event marketing and online survey tools, Constant Contact said today it’s taking the next step into social media, allowing the company to “make social media marketing simple for small businesses,” according to a press release.

The company counts more than 350,000 organizations as clients and already provides social media tools such as “Join my mailing list” Facebook apps, a share bar for newsletter subscribers and tweet-able events, among others. With the new acquisition Constant Contact is set to add more social media tools in the near future, in addition to opening a Bay Area office and consequently has begun hiring.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Online shopping just became a little bit more social, as Bing Shopping has integrated Facebook and Twitter into its interface. Now while using Bing Shopping, Facebook users can post an item to their profile, letting them begin conversations with their friends about the potential merits of owning it.

In a blog post yesterday Bing Shopping managers Lawrence Lam and Sonam Saxena announced that, since 75% of shoppers ask for advice — even while online shopping — Bing wanted to make its shopping experience more social, too. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is integrated into Facebook’s interface.

The pair wrote in the post, “With a single click you can ask for advice from your friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter for their take on a product you saw on Bing Shopping.” Bing Shopping is a service similar to Amazon and eBay that allows the user to search for products, generates a list of new to used items at different prices with product descriptions and often a photo.

Using the new feature is pretty simple, all you have to do after searching for your product is click on the Facebook button to share it to your profile, the Twitter button to tweet it or click on email to send the link to a friend.

More data is starting to come out about how Facebook’s new social plugins are impacting other sites around the web. The buttons, as intended, appear to be sending more Facebook users to other parts of the web, especially media sites.

IGN.com, a News Corp.-owned web site that covers media, digital distribution and video games, gets around 29 million monthly unique visitors. Two weeks in to using the plugins, it told ClickZ that it experienced a 20% increase in referral traffic from Facebook via the button. It’s not clear how much traffic that actually is, but it’s something.

The plugins, including the Like button, Recommendations and Activity Feed, were released at f8 on April 21 with 75 partners, including CNN and Levi’s, as we previously reported, and were implemented across 50,000 web sites within the first week of their introduction. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg predicted at f8 that the plugins would receive a billion impressions in the first 24 hours after launch — this happened. The caveat is that some  portion of the impressions were generated simply because people went to web pages that included the Like button but did not actually engage with it.

Facebook says its users have an average of 130 friends, with 25 billion pieces of content shared monthly by the 400 million-plus users on the service. The plugins, in one form or another, let you see overall Facebook user activity on other sites. The real value comes, though, when a user is signed in to Facebook and goes to another site. They show you what your Facebook friends have liked, shared, or otherwise engaged with on the other sites.

Referral traffic is enhanced because the plugins also make it easier to share activity back to Facebook for your friends to see and click through. If, say, you hit the Like button for a news article, a link to the article will show up in your personal profile’s stream of activities. It will also show up in your friends news feeds, at least in the unfiltered “Most Recent” view; the “Top News” view of the news feed doesn’t appear to show Likes very often. However, the other sharing widgets — like the Activity stream showing full shared links that your friends have posted to Facebook — are quite likely to show up in Top Stories.

Media sites were the subject of an interesting analysis by Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter. She found that, while some companies like ABCNews.com were enthusiastically embracing them, others like ESPN.com were being more cautious, and still others like The New York Times were developing ways to add even more socialization and personalization to the plugins. While the report focused on percentage gains rather than hard numbers, the changes appeard

One week into the plugins’ release, April 28, Tenore reported that ABCNews.com saw a 250% increase in referrals from Facebook. The company’s web site changed to feature an “ABC News on Facebook” module very prominently allowing those signed in via Facebook Connect to see numbers of people who liked a story; ABCNews.com also experienced a 50% boost in referrals from Twitter and Digg by adding those buttons to their stories.

“We’ve opted to place the Facebook recommendations higher than the most popular recommendations,” Jonathan Dube, vice president in charge of ABCNews.com told Poynter. “We believe that recommendations from people who are friends of yours are probably more likely to be stories that you’re interested in than a general ‘Most Popular’ list.”

CNN and The Washington Post were partners with Facebook when the plugins launched and both seemed to be very careful with how users perceived the plugins accessing their Facebook data. For CNN’s part, the module displaying stories recommended by Facebook friends on the right side of the company’s home page allows only a Facebook user’s friends to see their recommendation on the site. CNN used the “Recommend” button instead of Like, as it would be strange to like a story about the Haiti earthquake, for example.

“We really respect our users and we want them to feel open and engaged but not forced,” Jennifer Martin, senior director of public relations for CNN Worldwide told Poynter.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, allows anyone to see who likes something but includes an opt-out button giving users the option to hide the company’s Network News module featuring Facebook-recommended content. This module also helps readers stumble onto more content.

But, for The Post, money is definitely a factor when it comes to the plugins. Raju Narisetti, The Washington Post’s managing editor explained that by increasing engagement the company can attract more advertising and Facebook is an important way to do that.

“A lot of our content is circulated on Facebook, so we ought to make it easier for our readers who are on Facebook to share content and also see what their friends like and are reading without having to leave our site,” he was quoted as saying. “For a free site… more engaged readers have an impact on its ability to attract more advertising and thus help fund more content creation.”

So, taking media companies as an example, Facebook’s new plugins seem to have the potential to actually help businesses sell themselves to customers (or readers, etc.). Once people are able to intertwine Facebook with their preferred web sites, it would seem, the sites experienced increased traffic that may, in some cases, lead to more business. That’s at least what some managers are hoping for.

The potential for these plugins to generate revenue is just beginning to be explored. As we saw with Levi’s and their implementation of the plugin, the Like button is also particularly good for products. Yet, there are more subtle ways the plugins can help companies. The Activity Feed, for example, may expose a visitor to a web site to something they didn’t even know, or remember, they needed or wanted. An increase in traffic at a news site may allow a company to charge more for advertising. And there are, obviously, many more possibilities.

Media companies proved to be an interesting example, we’ll be on the lookout for more as web sites continue to develop around the plugins. For a more in-depth look at how plugins may affect the future of the web check out our premium service Inside Facebook Gold.

Experian Hitwise announced today that Facebook was the top search term in the United States during the four weeks ending on March 27, accounting for eight of the top searches across three separate top 10 lists. Search terms like “facebook,” “facebook login” and “facebook.com” amounted to 1.17% of Google’s search traffic, 1.7% of Yahoo’s and, not surprisingly (given its convenient in-Facebook location), 2.6% of Bing’s.

Facebook was the number 1 and number 3 searched terms on Google, Yahoo and Bing, the three search engines surveyed by Hitwise. Facebook mingled with email services like Yahoo mail and Gmail, craigslist, ebay, YouTube and MySpace on the top 10 lists.

Earlier this month we reported that Facebook had become the most searched-for brand in the U.S., also according to Hitwise, accounting for 2.8% of all searches in the country during the last week of March. Even while Facebook as a search term is growing, the social network’s own search query volume has also been growing. As we previously reported, Facebook approached the volume of one of the smaller search engines, Ask, with 647 million queries in March, about 2.7% of all U.S. searches.

[Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our new data and analysis membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth. Inside Facebook Gold presents weekly in-depth analysis articles exploring the most critical developments impacting the future of the Facebook ecosystem. Click here to learn more.]

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the Open Graph Protocol and the Open Graph API, a complementary set of technologies designed to make it easier for the web to be structured in a social way. The Open Graph vision is certainly an ambitious one, and the history of structured web initiatives is littered with the corpses of over-idealistic endeavors.

What makes Facebook’s attempt to organize the web in a new way different? And if it works, what will it mean for the way information is discovered online? Specifically, what will it mean for information that monetizes very well and thus forms the basis of the search marketing (SEM) and search optimization (SEO) industries?

>> Read more of this article at Inside Facebook Gold

We’re at Facebook’s f8 developer conference. Here’s our live blog. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is on stage:

Three years ago at our first f8, we launched Facebook platform. Together we started an industry.  Two years ago we announced Connect.

Three themes today:

First theme is “open graph:” Today the web exists mostly as a series of unstructured links between pages. Before it was unstructured updates posted to a stream (to create connections on open web). It was powerful but it was just a start. Does not understand the semantic connections (meaningful connections) between things.

The open graph puts people at center of the web. Meaningful connections between people and things. Makes the web instantly social and open wherever visitors go.

I’m friends with this person, I’m attending this event, I like this event. Today with the open graph, we’re going to bring all of these together.

Our second theme is “instantly social.” This means using the graph to make meaningful connections everywhere you go. The less friction, the faster they can get there. Making it simple.

Today, there are more than 400 million people on the site. For those users who aren’t on Facebook yet they probably will be soon.

We’re seeing even faster growth in other areas. It’s taken only three years to get to that number on mobile.

Connect has spread even faster. It took only 1 year to get to our mobile devices.

To get started today, we’re making some important policy changes.

We’re going to combine all the permissions dialogs into a single permissions dialog. Someone comes to your site, you can show them the dialog with all the different permission that you need. It’s a lot easier for users to figure out what they’re sharing.

The second change is this: We’ve had this policy where you can’t store and cache any data for more than 24 hours. We’re going to go ahead and get rid of that policy.

No more having to make the same API calls every day. We think that this step is going to make building with Facebook platform a lot simpler.

Credits is also still in private beta.

Part of the graph that Yelp has mapped out — it’s separate. You post something to the stream, it’s there for a few hours, then it floats away. The surfaces that consume the stream don’t actually form a connection. Don’t connect you and the places you’re connecting to.

Once it’s possible to understand how to connect these across services, we can put a review about your favorite restaurant along with all the others that you like. All these links will point back to the original object.

Our goal today is to use the Open Graph to have social experiences everywhere they go.

A few pieces of new technology:

- A completely new version of our platform called the Graph API. Makes simple to write graph connections back to the API, includes standard for how to represent the objects.

- Series of social plugins to make a site instantly social without having to write any code. Example: “Like” plugin. You can like a story on CNN and you can see all the activity that your friends have done on CNN. I have this experience instantly when I show up to CNN. They can use social plugins and I can have this great experience.

Head of product Bret Taylor comes on stage.

Like most social startups, we spent a lot of time trying to get more users. There was a magic number on FriendFeed for users who signed up on site. If they didn’t find 5 friends, they wouldn’t come back. We spent a huge amount of time trying to put users in. We launched an address book.

Late last year we put Facebook Connect on our home page. We didn’t have huge expectations. But it turned out to be the best business decision FriendFeed ever made. Facebook users 4x as likely to sign up. If we hadn’t been acquired by Facebook, we would have removed all our other sign-up buttons.

On the one hand, I was CEO and our growth was growing. I was also a programmer. Every time I wanted to do anything with Facebook’s platform, I had to weigh down with PHP code.

We’re changing that. We have three great product announcements today:

1. Social plugins

You’re going to hear a lot of people talking about themes.

Have your site content personalized based on your social network and interests. Just one line of HTML.

The most important social network social button is the like button. The most important mechanism is the like button. No dialog, no login.

By lowering the friction, we’ll dramatically increase sharing. Little friction, just an iframe. No register with Facebook, no nothing. Just the iframe. One line of HTML.

All these social plugins aren’t just about distribution. Facebook is serving these plugins.

We know who the user is. Even if we’ve never visited CNN before, if four of my friends like that article, I’ll see their names. But I’m getting personalized social concept.

Once you put the “like” button on your site, it’s social.

Transporting news feed to your site. Shows all activity restricted to your site’s domain. You can implement it with your domain.

Also launching recommendations plugin. Based on global activity, personal activity. We’ll suggest what’s most relevant. Truly personalized recommendations. Single line of HTML

Sign in with Facebook plugin: Shows other friends from Facebook who have already joined. Think about how much that would improve the sign-up rate. Finally we have the social bar. This is the kitchen sink of plugins: like, activity, Facebook chat. Cool thing is that it’s an all-in-one social experience.

That form factor will work on any web site. Looks nice under almost any UI. Not sure where to put buttons? Use the bar.

We have these like buttons powering social. Where do likes go when they come back to Facebook.com

Trend has been around real-time streams, reverse chronological lists. It’s a simple interface, but limited in a lot of ways. Only people who can see what I share are those sitting in front of the computer for 3 hours.

If I ‘like’ a band on Pandora, this only has value for 3 hours (in the feed). But, we have a music field in the profile — why are bands I put in when I joined Facebook 4 years ago so much more important than what I liked today?

2. Open Graph Protocol

Set of meta tags that you can mark up your pages. These tags tell Facebook when type of page it is. Examples of tags: title, type, genre, city. Tags show what type of real-world object it represents. Take ‘Green Day’ as an example. Tags would show that ‘Green Day’ means a punk rock band from Berkeley, CA. Semantic markup shows what it means.

With Open Graph Protocol, each webpage now has a semantic markup. When a user clicks like on the page, semantic info is used to mark that content on Facebook.

IMDB has pages marked up with these tags. There’s a Like button on every movie page. Users can go to share just like they do today, but now Facebook can see that you like Godfather, and that it’s a movie from 1972. And, it’ll go in profile. First order object. Go to profile and hover over link. See it’s from IMDB.

Semantic meaning will be represented even in search results.

Open graph protocol designed to represent anything. Launching with 30 partner sites.

All categories of likes and interests. Just as easily as you can connect — can also connect with athletes. Tomorrow’s the NFL draft. Toby Gerhardt in draft. I’m going to ESPN button. Click like. All features of Facebook.com

Can publish updates to all users. Tomorrow when Toby goes to the Browns, ESPN can send update to all people who like Toby.

Enables long-term communication channel between ESPN and users.

For years we’ve been saying we’re an open platform. For first time link to pages off Facebook. I’m updating with Like buttons all around the internet. Defined by things all around the web.

Today, defined by hyperlinks connecting static. We think connections between people and things they care about will define internet experiences.

Our goal is to accelerate.

3. Graph API:

Our attempt to re-imagine our core server side API in context of new graph structure. Re-architected from ground up.

Primary goal: two debugging tools you need are web browser and Curl. Shouldn’t need to download SDK and 20,000 lines of documentation.

Graph API: every object has unique ID. Every object has unique ID whether that’s a profile, a group, of an interest item. Developers can download object info from graph.facebook.com/userid.

Representations of graph are represented equally elegantly.

I’m a member of many groups. I’m a friend of Zuck, etc.

To download my friends, /btyalor/friends/
For my Likes, you can get from btaylor/likes/

This applies for every single object in Facebook.

New feature next year? Download object with new ID or new name. All code will continue to work perfectly.

New graph API not just a veneer. The one I’m most excited about is search. We have 400 million users sharing 25 billion things a month. Giving developers ability to search all public updates. For first time making web page for a brand, you can say what are people saying?

Also baking in real-time. Using web hooks, you can register callbacks, ping whenever users update wall posts, etc.

Now, you’d need to pull from our servers 1,000 times a day. Huge win not just for developers but for users.

Together with industry leaders. Adopting OAuth 2.0 standard.

First reason this is cool: industry standard. Code will work on Facebook and other adopted standards. Expect it to be widely adopted.

Objectively so much more awesome: Simple. Implement in 5 minutes.

Available on graph API and all others.

Zuck is back on….

We’ve worked with more than 75 partners.

When we launch later today, we expect we’ll serve 1 billion like buttons on the web within 24 hours on the web.

The web is at a really important turning point. The default has been that most things aren’t social and don’t use real identity. Ever since we launched Connect, implementations have been superficial. But this is starting to change.

Use connect for the entire experience. Now with open graph and social plugins, even more sites use instantly social experiences without even having to Connect.

Default will be social on the web. From ground up. Just one more cool thing: A little glimpse of the future.

When we started thinking about a web where the default was social. Just a small group of trusted companies… go to site without having to click Connect.

What if these sites already knew public information about users. Microsoft: Docs.com

Today, Microsoft is announcing docs.com today. Online version of Office suite. Way it works is like this. Go to doc, click, see doc, that’ll take you straight to docs.com.

Can show you without re-authenticate. Can click on blue bar, turn off all personalization because you clicked on link to see doc. Immediately you can see the document, write, share comments. All of the power of Office online. With Facebook.

Assumption is that every user would have identity and friends. Will be ready later today.

Another example: Pandora.

Now, for first time, when you show up, it will be able to start playing music from bands you’ve been playing across the web. Start playing music, show which friends like similar music. Click on them.

Show music they like. You can say that you like different bands. Form a connection, form it in the open graph. Use those preferences in other applications.

As a closing thought, quick story: my girlfriend is in medical school.

She told me this story where she was in a lecture on what it means to be a med student. The dean asked question: who had experience where it occurred that taking care of people and human life was important. Everyone had an anecdote. The dean went on to say he’d done a similar exercise in law school class. Asked who had significant early memory about caring people is important. No one put their hand up.

Don’t ask — how many have a significant early memory about fairness.

I was thinking — what would that be for our community. People who spend their lives making things. A lot of my memories about if more information was available, more open and transparent.

We have a lot of early memories. The world could be a lot better, and we could make it that way. The world can be a lot better, and we’re going to make it that way.

There’s an old saying that when you go to heaven all of your friends are there. Let’s make it that way.

Facebook’s new user profile Pages transition tool includes an obvious and yet not obvious way that users might make personal information more publicly available.

The company is launching a set of new Pages designed for non-commercial purposes today, and as part of that it is asking users to convert elements of static data on their Profile into links to Pages. This includes Pages for profile categories like Current City, Home Town, Activities, Interests, and Things I Like. The transition tool is designed to help users pick out the right Pages for their profiles. It comes with options to only do individual Pages if the user prefer. There’s also a way to “snooze,” but no way to opt out completely from going through the tool.

Meanwhile, all Pages are by default public. If you “like” one (or formerly “become a fan” of one), then everyone can see this information by default. This means that if you previously set these areas to somehow be private, the transition tool that Facebook has for you to add Pages will automatically reset these areas to be “Everyone.” If you don’t want those items to be visible to the public, you need to go back in and set them back to the stricter privacy settings you prefer. However, it is still possible for anyone see any Pages that you added through other means, for example by manually looking through all the fans of a Page.

This point seems obvious, because the Pages are by default public. If you “Like” your home town, people who look at the Page of your home town can still see you even if you decided to hide that information and show it to only your direct friends on Facebook. This is how Pages have worked already.

What might confuse some users, though, is the fact that they already had their privacy settings restrict this personal information. They may not realize that the transition tool just moved their settings to the Page default instead of what they had manually chosen. Facebook, for its part, seems to be trying to remind users of the ramifications, because the pages of the transition tool includes the words “Remember, your Pages are public.”

When I first started InsideFacebook.com in 2006, Facebook was already a staple of college life and a sign of the future of the social web. Since then, it has grown to become a very widely adopted communications and identity service, a powerful advertising and entertainment platform, and a household name as one of the world’s largest websites. But even today, Facebook’s full potential still lies ahead in the years to come as the social graph becomes more embedded in media, applications, and devices all around us.

These days, Facebook’s business has become a big deal for brands marketing to the millions of users logging in on a daily basis, for entrepreneurs building businesses on its platform, and for analysts and investors interested in charting Facebook’s growing revenues. Facebook is no longer simply a social networking website – it has become a broad online ecosystem, supporting thousands of related businesses and on track to doing over $1 billion in revenues this year.

It’s this extraordinary growth and potential, and also the underlying complexities and unknowns, that have attracted the attention of so many. With InsideFacebook.com, AppData.com, and reports like the upcoming Facebook Quarterly Business Review (we’ll have more info soon), we at Inside Network have sought to deeply analyze and understand Facebook’s potential as a social utility, a platform for developers and advertisers to do business, and a growing business itself. But, readers have consistently requested more business-focused analysis and in-depth coverage of key ecosystem issues.

All these reasons make us very excited to announce Inside Facebook Gold, an exclusive new analysis and data membership service specifically dedicated to tracking Facebook’s business and growth around the world – and the impact of Facebook’s product and policy decisions on the thousands of businesses worldwide that are investing in it.

Inside Facebook Gold is directed at entrepreneurs, agencies, analysts, and investors who want to stay ahead of Facebook’s rapid worldwide growth, make more informed business decisions based on Facebook product and policy developments, and understand the full scope of opportunities the Facebook ecosystem presents.

Inside Facebook Gold includes weekly in-depth analysis that is not available on InsideFacebook.com, comprehensive quarterly business reviews detailing every aspect of Facebook’s business, and regular global trend and data insights to help you track change and opportunity around the world. We’ll be posting updates here as new reports are released to Inside Facebook Gold members.

>> Learn more about Inside Facebook Gold here.

Back in 2006, when we started InsideFacebook.com, no one could have expected Facebook to become what it has today.  With Inside Facebook Gold, we’re looking forward to bringing you data and analysis that will equip you to make critical decisions as the Facebook ecosystem continues to rapidly develop and grow in the years ahead.

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook – March 2010 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, Italian, and print.

The densely-packed Facebook Marketing Bible contains four detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, Tools for Application Developers, and Tools for Webmasters. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

In addition, Inside Facebook is happy to announce that through March 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms). Now that Facebook has crossed the 400 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience inside Facebook.

The March 2010 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Detailed updates on Facebook’s latest home page redesign and privacy updates, and what it means for Page owners and developers. Facebook’s “privacy update” a few weeks ago had many users up in arms – but how will it change Facebook marketing? And now that Facebook has moved back to a “Top Stories” view of the News Feed by default, new rules apply for maximizing your reach and engagement within Facebook. We’ve broken down all the new rules and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook – including details on other new features like real time search, status tagging, status targeting, Twitter integration, why marketers should choose Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups, key SEO strategies every Facebook Page owner should know, and the best tools to manage your Facebook Page. See the table of contents below for more details.
• Updated details on Facebook’s new Promo/Sweepstakes guidelines for Pages, and how to make sure you’re staying within them. Facebook recently updated the policies that all marketers must abide by when conducting sweepstakes or promotions inside Facebook. We have all the do’s and don’ts. In addition, we have all the details on Facebook’s new policies for subscription and download ads, and details on recent tweaks to Facebook’s home page engagement ads.
• The latest updates on Facebook’s advertising tools, including the per post insights, conversion tracking, and powerful new targeting features. Now that Facebook’s new Ads Manager is here, Facebook Ads are becoming more efficient to use than ever before. And, with Facebook’s new “connection” targeting, “friends of connections” targeting, birthday targeting, and time scheduling tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in more targeted ways – and measure them with Facebook’s improved per post insights. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• The latest details on Facebook’s Platform API changes and Facebook Credits virtual currency payment service for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s latest Platform API changes mean for marketers, and what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues) – including Facebook’s latest international currency efforts.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect, Facebook Share, and Facebook widgets. With Facebook Connect (now available in dozens of languages) and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
• New tools for advertisers to target their Facebook Ads better than ever before. With enhanced Facebook targeting tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in much more powerful ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• Plus, more updates on the removal of application notifications, what that means for marketers, and more.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $95 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $295 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $95, or $295 with 12 months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $95 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $295 USD

As a followup to our note a few weeks ago, 5 Things All Page and Brand Managers Should Know About Facebook’s Recent Updates, Facebook has made three more important policy and product change announcements to Facebook Pages that agencies, marketers, and developers should be aware of.

1) All contests administered on Facebook Pages must only allow users to enter through applications, and must be approved by Facebook first

Running promotions on Facebook Pages and inside Facebook apps is one of the simplest and most effective ways of engaging Facebook users. However, while Facebook does allow third parties to run contests and promotions on Facebook, it has been posting increasingly specific guidelines throughout the past year detailing just what is and what isn’t allowed.

Facebook recently posted a new set of promotional guidelines that go into much more detail. We’ve excerpted and highlighted some of the most relevant sections below, but the most important part: All promotions that run on Facebook must be fully located on either 1) the canvas page of an application, or 2) in an application box or tab on a Facebook Page – AND you must get prior Facebook approval before the promotion starts.

This means the following types of Facebook contests are not allowed:

• “Status update” contests (like the one that Intuit ran)
• “Photo upload” contests (like the one Utah restaurant Mo’ Bettah Steaks ran)
• Any kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed (brands could otherwise boost their News Feed engagement and thus distribution by constantly running contests in the feed)

Instead, all contest promotions must be run through third party applications, and must be approved by Facebook “at least 7 days prior to the start date.” This is especially important for all Page administrators to be aware of, as many businesses and organizations have been experimenting with different types of contests to drive traffic and engagement on their Facebook Page.

2) Page owners CAN condition contest entry upon becoming a fan

Since the new Facebook Page policy announcements, there has been considerable confusion about the ways that Facebook Page owners can — or can’t — offer promotions inside Facebook. But Facebook made more changes to its promotions guidelines on December 22, adding the following line, in bold:

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.  You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

Requiring people to become fans to enter a promotion “has always been allowed, but we wanted to make it explicit as we often got questions about it,” according to a Facebook spokesperson. “So it’s not a new policy, but is new language in the policy.” The company’s latest guidelines also offer some examples at the end of the document about specific ways Page owners can or can’t condition entry.

3) Page tab widths are changing soon

Facebook’s developer documentation says that tab widths for apps on “profiles and Pages” will be changing from 760 pixels wide to 520 pixels wide in “late 2009/early 2010.” Given that we’re in early 2010 now, we expect this change to be coming soon.

This is a pretty important change for all agencies and Page managers to be aware of, because this means that all Pages that have created custom tabs (either application tabs or tabs designed around special promotions) will need to be updated to fit the new width. If not, they might look broken or poorly designed.

Facebook hasn’t given a specific date for when the new widths will be rolling out to Pages, but since we’ve already finished “late 2009″ it could be coming very soon. We’ll let you know as soon as we have more information on the rollout schedule. For now, agencies and page managers should prepare to make the transition even though we don’t know exactly when it will happen.