Kelsey Agnew

You’ve undoubtedly heard rumblings that your Facebook profile is about to change. Pretty drastically. I think it’s the biggest shift in user experience Facebook has made to date, but I also think it’s one of the smartest moves they’ve ever made. Sure, people will gripe and whine and boycott for a week or two like they always do, but they’ll soon learn to love the new Timeline interface. It gives users what they want — an outlet for self-expression an opportunity to project a carefully-crafted version of themselves to the world — while simultaneously allowing Facebook to access very, very detailed information about each user, which can then be used for very, very targeted advertising campaigns.

Facebook will tell users that they’ve built Timeline to provide individuals with the ability to archive and recall personal data, and it does do that. But the more information users plug in to their timelines (Broke a bone? Had surgery? Lost a loved one?), the more sentimental value they’re going to attach to it, and the more likely it is that they’ll continue logging in to Facebook to view or update the data they’ve entered. If users buy into Timeline — and they will, because it’s pretty and easy, and also a great way to simultaneously indulge in a little bit of narcissism while letting people know who you are (or who you want them to think you are) — they’re likely to become users for life. There is no option to download, print, or otherwise save your timeline. If you want to see what you’ve written or where you’ve been as it’s been tracked by Facebook, you’ll have to log in, and when you do so, you’ll be confronted with ads from companies that have made inferences about your relationships, your livelihood, and your personality based on the details you’ve added to your timeline.

So why is the radical shift to the timeline format a smart choice on Facebook’s part? Because it makes the social network much more than a communication tool without sacrificing simplicity. When paired with Facebook’s recently updated privacy settings, it allows users to project highly-specific, multidimensional images of themselves to their networks while maintaining authenticity by adding dates and tags and check-ins. And of course, it means incredible marketing opportunities for advertisers, since they’ll be able to target users in a much more individualized manner based on all those little details you can now enter into your timeline.

I’d mark my calendar for that IPO if I were you.

When someone first came to me asking for a company-wide LinkedIn marketing strategy, it seemed like sort of a silly (and spammy) idea. Why would an employer want to help his employees optimize their LinkedIn profiles – their “resumes on steriods,” as they’re often called – to get more hits and show up higher in search engine rankings? I’d only ever used LinkedIn to search for (and apply to) jobs, and I figured that was all it could be used for: strategic networking to make career moves.

Turns out I was wrong. LinkedIn can actually be an excellent B2B marketing tool if you know how to use it correctly, and you don’t have to turn yourself into a spambot to do so. To make the most of your account, keep these two goals in mind when you’re using LinkedIn:

Optimize. Search engines like LinkedIn and fresh content, so if you regularly update your profile, you’ll be more likely to show up at the top of results pages when people are searching for your name. However, if you use just the right key words and phrases, you can also boost your rankings when people are searching for broader terms related to your area of expertise and profession. The two sections you’ll want to make sure are keyword-optimized are the outbound links that appear near the top of your profile and your ‘Specialties’ section, which is frequently indexed by Google and the other major search engines.

You can add up to 3 links to your profile and have the option to customize their anchor text, which can help improve your rankings (and the rankings of the website you’re linking to) for that particular keyword. For instance, if you work for XYZ Marketing Agency, provide a link to your company website with the anchor text “XYZ Marketing Agency,” not just the standard “Company website.” Likewise, if you’re a blogger who focuses on digital marketing strategies, link to your blog with anchor text like “Digital Marketing Strategies Blog.” Be as specific as possible.

You should also include as many relevant keywords as you can muster up in your ‘Specialties’ section, separated either by commas or line breaks. Try to include everything you have experience with to broaden your horizons and the effectiveness of your optimization. People will be able to find you when they’re looking for a professional in a given industry whether they’re using LinkedIn’s internal search function or an external search engine.

Contribute. And that doesn’t just mean join a lot of groups. Yes, you’ll want to seek out, join, and participate in relevant LinkedIn groups where you can use your professional expertise to help out prospective clients and industry peers, but there are a number of other ways you can contribute to your LinkedIn network and let them know that you’re a reputable source when it comes to (blank). Check out LinkedIn Answers, where users can ask and answer questions that are categorized by topic. This feature is similar to Quora but has a more closely defined set of categories, all of which relate to work and business in one way or another. You can ask or answer questions about everything from sales and marketing strategies – what works vs. what doesn’t – to the legalities of forming a startup, the benefits of pursuing a post-graduate degree, and more.

You should also take care to update your status on a regular basis, and to review your network’s updates while you’re at it. Status updates are a great chance to strut your stuff by letting people know about a project you’ve been working on, a big sale you just made, or to ask for business advice or suggestions. When you comment on other users’ status updates, your comment will show up to everyone in their network, too, so it’s a great way to gain some (potentially valuable) exposure.

Of course, make sure that your profile is always up-to-date. Including information like your entire job history, links to any projects you’re working on, current contact information, and recommendations is important, but becomes irrelevant if you never log in and don’t do anything to drive traffic to your profile. Once you start to use LinkedIn to establish yourself as an authority within your industry, people will start turning to you for solutions and partnerships. Whether you’re a freelancer, a CEO, or somewhere in between, there are easy and effective ways to draw people to your business by way of your LinkedIn profile, making it a great tool for your marketing and branding efforts, both personal and company-wide.

There’s something about Google+. It’s easily Google’s best contribution to the social realm, already outshining platforms like Buzz, Wave, and Friend Connect (which you may have never even heard of) and hitting the 10 million user mark within a few weeks of its launch. That launch was nothing special, either – like with many Google products, the introduction of Google+ to the user community seemed like sort of an afterthought. While first impressions aren’t always Google’s forte, they certainly haven’t hindered the growth of its social network: Mashable reports that of of an estimated 10 million users, 2.2 million of those have joined in the past day and a half.

So why are people so eager to join Google+? As some have suggested, it might have something to do with the exclusivity factor. It’s been an invite-only network thus far, and we always like to feel like we’ve been specially selected to try out something new. Part of what people loved about Facebook was lost when it decided to open up membership to users who weren’t necessarily associated with a college or university. And then another part of it was lost when brands caught wind of the platform and started pushing some serious advertising messages into everything we did. Maybe we like it because it’s allowed us to feel like we’re escaping those ads that seem to follow us everywhere we go online (for now). Of course, we’re not – Google+ is a Google product, which means that any information you pump into it will be used to determine which display advertisements you see, which websites show up first in your Google search results, and how you’re marketed to on other Google platforms such as Gmail.

Maybe we like Google+ because it makes one of the more complicated aspects of Facebook use – privacy – seem much more simple to understand. On Facebook you can sort your friends into lists to control who has access to what information, but unlike Google+ Circles, Facebook lists require a lot of clicking around and experimenting to really know what you’re giving certain people access to. Facebook also tends to introduce new “default” privacy settings on a regular basis without pointing out how these changes affect your information and how you can customize them.

With Google+, it’s easy to view your profile as another user, and directly under any content you post are some shiny little buttons that indicate which of your Circles will be able to see and engage with it. We’ve all got different airs and different images we want to project depending on who’s watching us. Google+ lets you be yourself with your friends, your professional self with your coworkers, and your well-behaved self with your family, all from a single platform.

So maybe it’s the simplicity. Maybe it’s the immediate lack of advertising. Maybe it’s the schizophrenic hidden inside of all of us. Or maybe it’s because Google+ is just better than any other platform. It’s not just a web-based platform where we can go to be social – it brings a personal, social aspect to the web itself.