The algorithm of a perfect tweet; how brands can take advantage of Facebook’s Timeline; and last year’s biggest social media screw-ups.

It’s all in this week’s top five most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media:

• How will Facebook’s Timeline help brands?
• Model suggests the secrets for wildly successful tweets
• Dad goes ballistic over daughter’s Facebook complaint
• Who made the biggest social media mistakes of 2011?
• Can anything stop the social-curation trend?

Image credit: narvikk, via iStockphoto

This post is by Jim Belosic, co-founder and president of Pancake Laboratories, the creator of ShortStack, an application built on the Facebook platform that offers affordable, white-label tab design including contests, commenting, sharing and many other easy-to-use features.

Since Facebook converted personal profiles to Timelines, the rumor mill has been fired up with the speculation that Pages will soon follow suit. On February 15, Facebook executives confirmed these rumors and announced their plan to add Timeline for Pages this month.  Although no one is exactly sure what this means for brands and for third-party platforms  (such as ShortStack) there are changes ahead that will affect everyone.

The relationship between Facebook, developers and businesses:

Facebook could have created a closed, static platform that gave every Page the same basic features. Instead, the Facebook platform is open to creations from third-party developers, and this says a lot about their approach to their relationships with developers and businesses. Custom tab applications like ShortStack allow businesses to create custom tabs that encourage fans to interact with each other, help increase a brand’s presence, and provide content, contests and promotions. Companies rely on their custom tabs for gathering user data, generating sales, customer support and much more. In addition, companies spend a lot of money promoting their custom tabs through Facebook ads. Businesses spend lots of money on Facebook ads to drive traffic to their custom tabs. According to February 2012 data from Kenshoo, Facebook ad budgets grew 109% month-over-month in the fourth quarter of 2011. It could be argued that a large percentage of the traffic seen on Facebook can be contributed to third-party services and thus far in Facebook’s history, they’ve shown to value this and the profit it brings to the platform.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has undergone significant changes, and it won’t be the last. The good news is that since the introduction of Pages, the platform has always allowed for businesses and brands to offer more than just an Info tab. Facebook has kept this feature, which leads to the belief that they respect a brand’s presence on Facebook and would want to keep the methods developed for brands to maintain their presence. It would be a surprise to see them get rid of these features.

How to prepare for Timeline changes on Pages:

No one knows exactly what Facebook is going to do next until there is an official announcement, which will come on Feb. 29 at the first-ever fMC event. However, Facebook does have a 90-day notification policy for breaking changes, so third-party platforms will have time to learn what will be changing and how to adjust their services.

What businesses need to keep in mind is that there is going to be a lot of hype and a lot of press around this change. Rumors will fly and the energy will be hard to ignore. However, it’s in Facebook’s best interest to expand upon current capabilities, not limit the things everyone loves and relies on. Facebook has gone through numerous overhauls in the past, and businesses and third-party platforms have stayed ahead of the game and adjusted.

This post is by Heidi Cohen, principal of Riverside Marketing Strategies. For more of her analysis of the Suxorz, including what these failures can teach you, check out her blog.

Face it: It’s easy to select the awards for the best of something. You can watch trending social media shares, favorite lists, comments, purchases or other factors to decide what came out on top. But when it comes to the worst-in-class, it’s more challenging. You have to differentiate the no-names from the out-right failures, based on their poor showing on a variety of metrics. That’s what distinguishes the “winners” of this year’s “Suxorz” awards as the worst social media of 2011.

This year’s Suxorz panel chose the worst of social media across an array of topics. Among the top social media taste-makers were David Berkowitz of 360i, writer Twanna Hines, Brian Morrissey of Digiday and B.L. Ochman of What’s Next Blog. It was moderated by Henry Copeland of BlogAds, while Jon Accarrino of Definition 6 played DJ.

Now, without further ado, here are 2011’s worst social media sins. All of the options are included so you can get a feel for the variety of issues that were discussed. (Note: Because links weren’t shared during the event, I tried to get relevant links where possible.) (read more…)

This poll analysis was written by Jeremy Victor, president of Make Good Media and editor-in-chief of B2Bbloggers.com. For more of his writing, visit B2Bbloggers.com and follow him on Twitter and Google+.

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.

As Wall Street and Silicon Valley foamed at the mouth waiting for news of Facebook’s initial public offering filing a couple weeks ago (and I got annoyed), most of the anticipation centered on Facebook’s future market valuation. How much revenue is it generating? How much profit? And should that justify the speculated $100 billion valuation?

With some of those questions answered in the S1 filing, we thought this week we’d ask, Do you worry that Facebook will start charging brands for Facebook pages after its IPO? The results:

• Yes: 59.26%
• No: 40.74%

Before I get into how $66 could double Facebook’s advertising revenue, let me share with you some context and the reason I think it is entirely appropriate to worry (or not). First, in the S1 filing, we learn that Facebook’s advertising revenue grew a staggering 69% in 2011 to $3.15 billion, which is about 85% of their total revenue ($3.7 billion). From the S1 we also learn:

• Our advertising revenue is generated by displaying ad products on our website. Advertisers pay for ad products displayed on Facebook based on the number of impressions delivered or the number of clicks made by our users.
• We enable advertisers to engage with more than 800 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests.

So to date, the advertising revenue is coming from display ad products. Nothing new, right? Peter Kafka, of All ThingsD, labels it a mystery as to how it all works. But E.B. Boyd of Fast Company shares that the success is based on the targeting, not mass reach. Either way, it is almost a certainty that the display ad business is really just the tip of the iceberg from an advertising revenue perspective. (read more…)