Likely not.

Facebook has already become the 800 million pound gorilla (it has 800 active million users worldwide). It will likely grow and the money it collects from its IPO will likely help it reach some strategic goals, but the core aspect of its product will likely not change much if at all.

Maybe it will get better and maybe it will get worse, but change? Let’s see …

• Facebook offers personal profiles to anyone willing to sign up for an account and provide certain specific private information to the company based on its user’s term of service.
• Companies can set up a brand page and promote themselves to users through that page.
• Developers can build apps that interact with Facebook and allow users to engage with marketers, businesses, and savvy development agents.
• Facebook also offers paid advertising models for businesses wanting to reach new prospects.
• You can interact with Facebook through you desktop computer, laptop, smart phone, or tablet.

What else could Facebook offer? What else likely to be offered as a result of the private company becoming public?

Of course, new technologies could lead to Facebook expanding its offerings to its consumer base, but that would happen anyways. The company already has made billions of dollars so the money it collects from the IPO will not likely give it much more financial clout that it already has. So why go public?

It is likely that investors and shareholders realize that certain information is going to end up public anyway so why not be the first to make the disclosure? It’s a good political move for Facebook to go public, but don’t count on the IPO changing the service in any drastic way. Social networking will continue as it has for the last five years.

Consider this:

How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really – more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.

What Cyrus Shepard doesn’t tell you is that Google knows its own algorithms better than anyone else. It has the inside information. Facebook doesn’t. And that’s one of the reasons that Facebook is at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, the SEO principles that Cyrus shares in his post are pretty much all common knowledge. They’re things that everyone – even Facebook – at this point should understand.

One really telling point is how Facebook blocks Google from crawling its profile pages. As Cyrus points out:

Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.

On the one hand, Google+ has an advantage in the search engines because it is owned by the largest and most popular search engine. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t employ sound SEO tactics anyway, so if you take away the Google+ advantage, Facebook would still be at a disadvantage.

So what’s the lesson here? No matter what business you are in, think about how search engine optimization can help you reach your goals.

Timeline has been billed as a new way to use social media. Instead of the traditional profile, your entire life story will appear as photos, videos, posts, stories, and whatever else you post on Facebook. There are two ways to get Timeline right now.

1. You can go into Introducing Timeline and click the green “Get Timeline” button at the bottom of the page; or
2. You can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your profile.

If you’re in a hurry to get your Timeline active, go to Introducing Timeline and get started. But beware. You have 7 days to review your Timeline and remove anything you don’t want to be seen publicly. After that, it’s live and you won’t have a choice any more.

Now the question is, can you use your Timeline for your business? And the answer is, Sure, why not?

The Timeline can essentially be used the same way you currently use your profile for business. The difference is you can now include prominent photos and videos. Everything you upload or post will go into your Timeline. That includes business-related and personal. This could be a great tool for sole proprietors, freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Facebook is moving forward. Are you?

It’s easy to see where he is coming from in choosing these companies to represent what the world may look like 25 years from now. But that’s a long time in Internet time. Remember, it only took a decade for any of these companies to make an impact on the world as it is now.

But his blog post does make me question some things about the direction that the Web is moving in. Here are a few that come to mind.

1. Will Apple primarily become a mobile app company?
2. Why hasn’t Microsoft leveraged its core products by hosting them in the cloud? It seems that this could be a key area of competitive advantage given the popularity of services like Google Docs, Zoho, and Salesforce.
3. Can Google succeed in becoming the core reputation management platform online? Has it already?
4. Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of the Web? Can it put Wal-Mart “out of business?”
5. Can Amazon position itself as the premier cloud service for the Web in the next 20 years?
6. Would a public IPO push Facebook higher in the rankings, perhaps past Amazon, or Google?
7. Who will emerge as the Internet’s most prominent icon for the next generation? Will it be Google, Facebook, Amazon, or some company we haven’t heard of yet?
8. Can Google win as long as it maintains confidence in the Open Source Web given that none of the other four companies do?

The interesting thing about this list is that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have core online businesses. Apple is integrated heavily into mobile apps. Google, of course, is the leading search engine. Facebook is the leading social network. Amazon is the leading e-commerce website. Only Microsoft has a core business that is not an online business – its Office suite of products. How will that affect the Internet for the next generation. If Microsoft doesn’t take its core product online, will it become obsolete?

What are your thoughts?

• Do you have the resources to manage multiple pages? For every page you have you’ll need at least one administrator. Does your administrator have time to manage those pages while also attending to their other duties within the company?
• Do you have the money to outsource the administration of your Facebook pages? If you cannot have someone inside your organization manage your pages, then you’ll have to pay someone else to do it. Is it affordable?
• Does each Facebook page have a strategy? It’s conceivable to have a Facebook page for each product you sell or each division within your company, but you also need a strategy for each page. Who is responsible for developing that strategy and is implementation feasible for each page you want to develop?
• Do you have enough content to fill each page you want to develop?

Facebook marketing has become a strategy all on its own. Make sure you have the proper resource before you implement a Facebook marketing strategy, including multiple pages for your business.

• Facebook settles privacy dispute with FTC. Of course, there were no fines levied, but Facebook will have to undergo a biannual privacy audit for the next 20 years. Will that change anything? This specific ruling may not change much in the near short term, but I’d expect to see more privacy laws in place to protect online consumers and Internet users.
• Did Facebook purchase Gowalla? Neither Facebook nor Gowalla are confirming these rumors, but CNN reported it as true.
• Facebook is opening an office in New York. The office will be an engineering office and they are now accepting applications.
• Facebook Insights includes negative feedback. If you have a business page on Facebook and you want to know when someone has left negative feedback, you’ll now be able to see that in your page metrics through Facebook Insights.
• Facebook will run a mini-web series. Looking for entertainment? It’s supposed to be a documentary.

With all this talk of Facebook, if you run a business and you want to know the best practices for marketing through Facebook, talk to someone who knows how to meet your needs.

A look at the numbers is really telling:

Very Effective:

• Facebook = 36%
• Twitter = 14%
• Video sharing = 14%
• LinkedIn = 10%
• Review sites = 7%
• Google+ = 5%
• Local/daily deals = 5%
• MySpace = 1%

Moderately effective:

• Facebook = 47%
• Twitter = 32%
• Video sharing = 23%
• LinkedIn = 24%
• Review sites = 12%
• Google+ = 7%
• Local/daily deals = 6%
• MySpace = 2%

Don’t use the site:

• Facebook = 4%
• Twitter = 24%
• Video sharing = 47%
• LinkedIn = 38%
• Review sites = 65%
• Google+ = 70%
• Local/daily deals = 76%
• MySpace = 81%

I don’t think anyone is surprised that more than 80% of small businesses aren’t using MySpace. What is surprising is that 76% of small businesses aren’t using the local and daily deals websites. Or that 65% aren’t using review sites.

While it’s easy to say that Facebook is effective for the small businesses that are using it, it’s really difficult to compare it to sites they aren’t using. Can we really compare?

Who’s to say that review sites and local deals sites wouldn’t be more effective if more businesses didn’t use them?

The question on everyone’s mind is whether or not there is a social media site poised to give Facebook a run for its money. Right now it seems that Google+ might have the mojo, but getting small business owners to try it seems to be the challenge.

If you are a small business owner and you’re ready for social media, are you going to try Facebook? Do you see an alternative?

YouTube is the second biggest search engine online. But it’s more of a social media website due to its viral video nature.

Twitter and Google+ are both in the top ten most trafficked sites online as well. And LinkedIn isn’t too far behind.

But the race isn’t over yet. All of the social media sites are working hard every day to improve themselves. The latest, Google+, is constantly improving and growing fast. It could become the second most trafficked website online in a matter of months. And Google is already suggesting that it will be the face of Google in the future. How that will affect its traffic numbers is anybody’s guess.

Who will ultimately win this war between social media websites is indeterminable. What is important for business owners is that you have menu options. You are not stuck using one social media site for your marketing and branding.

In fact, if you aren’t using multiple sites to establish a social media presence, then you aren’t getting the full benefit of social media marketing. The best approach to social media is to analyze the sites for their strengths and determine which ones make most sense for your business, niche, and situation.

Google+ is really all about integrating all of Google’s services into one service that ties them all together socially. Facebook is just about connection. Period. Always has been.

Later this month Facebook will introduce its Timeline across the board to every user. How will that change things?

First, you’ll be able to add a huge header at the top of your Timeline to define who you are and what you’re about. That’s a very important branding element for small business owners who are using Facebook for marketing.

The Timeline is being billed as the story of your life. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, it could just as well be the story of your business’s life. And that’s huge. But is it really a whole lot different than what you have now?

It will be easier to search for past events in your Timeline – for you and for your subscribers.

Oh, and speaking of subscribers, that’s something else Facebook has added. Instead of friending everyone who asks, just get them to subscribe to your public updates. You could build a business on subscribers alone. What do you think of that?

In its first two weeks of being public, Google+ saw 2 million new users. Its servers slowed down and some users experienced a few minor glitches while using the service. That’s a good thing.

No outages. Nothing stratospheric in terms of hiccups. But it was noticeable.

Google+ still continues to grow at a steady and highly noticeable pace. Many users are anxiously waiting for business accounts to be introduced. That will add another level of competition between Facebook and Google+, a competitive landscape that is already pretty tough. But what about LinkedIn and Twitter?

At last count, Google was somewhere in the neighborhood of No. 5 or 7 in traffic for social media websites – right behind Twitter and LinkedIn. It won’t take much growth to pass them both.

I think we may be leaving the world where social marketers proclaimed Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter were the most important social services for businesses. In the future, you will likely hear that Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the most useful services. Do you agree?

Why would you want to activate Facebook Subscriptions? Plain and simply, because it allows others to follow your Facebook updates without friending you. That’s a benefit to you since you don’t have to be bothered with friending them back and being inundated with status updates for everyone who falls into that category.

People will use the Subscription feature to see if you are someone they want to friend. If your status updates are useful to them, then they’ll friend you. So it’s a good way to screen people to see if you want them to be your friend or not.

To activate your subscriptions, go to your Facebook profile and click on your name to go to your home page. Under your profile photo, click Subscriptions. On the right tab you’ll see a button labeled “Allow Subscriptions.” Click it. Then you can edit your permissions to determine who can leave comments and participate on your wall.

Facebook is beginning to become a useful marketing tool for small businesses. But you have to use intelligently.

Now, Facebook has joined the party.

Starting next year, Facebook will give away $10 million in free advertising to small business owners.

There’s more to the story than Facebook merely wanting to steal your business from Google. That would be nice for Facebook, but they really want you to start advertising on their platform – even if you continue using Google AdWords.

Most small business owners haven’t figure out how to use social media as a marketing tool. But they understand advertising. With 800 million + users, Facebook has a huge opportunity for small businesses to tap into the company’s user base and that’s why they are willing to give you $50 in free advertising to get you to at least try it.

I think the opportunity is a great opportunity for small businesses. Google AdWords has proved to be a very effective marketing channel for businesses that have tried it. Facebook’s advertising platform is a different animal, but it’s an animal worth riding nonetheless. Pay per click is no longer a search engine advertising tool; it’s gone social.

It’s important to point out that the changes Facebook made were to make their shareholders and advertisers happy. They weren’t for the end users.

That said, if you are a Facebook user, understand that you are a free user. In order to be able to continue using Facebook for free, the company will have to make money from somewhere. Advertisers want to be able to market their products to you. Shareholders want the company to be able to make money. Facebook executives are in the awkward position of trying to balance all of these interests.

So what about the changes? Were they good? Some of them actually are.

If you took a look at Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address at the f8 Conference recently, you’d have noticed that Facebook is introducing a concept they call Timeline. This will transform your personal profile page into a timeline of your life. You can manage it any way you want.

Even better, Zuck says when you play the social games available to you through Facebook, you won’t get those annoying pop-ups that you see continuously notifying you of your friends’ activities.

While the new Facebook changes may be annoying many people, the people who are most put off by them are getting to use the service for free. It will be the advertisers paying for the changes.

Speaking of Facebook, they’re supposed to make a big announcement today. Are you listening?

This kind of suspense makes me wonder a few things.

• If you’re already No. 1, should you be talking about revolutions? I mean, I thought Facebook had already revolutionized social networking.
• Is Facebook, even just a little bit, somewhat concerned that they might lose a few users if they go off the deep end and change too much?
• Does competition mandate a change? (I wonder if Google+ would say “yes?”)
• Will the average user like Facebook even better after the new changes, like it less, or about the same? And will that even matter?
• Could Facebook be preparing the way for businesses to be more interactive through its social networking interface?

There are a lot of questions that can be answered about Facebook’s coming announcement. They’d all be speculative. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I’m a bit anxious, aren’t you?

1. Don’t understand your audience
2. Don’t be imaginative
3. Don’t track your marketing
4. Don’t build relationships with your fans
5. Don’t hire social media experts

Of course, these points could apply to any type of social media marketing. But I think they are all golden.

The first step to success at any endeavor is to understand your audience. Fail to do that and you might as well not make any products.

Secondly, in this century, marketing must be innovative and imaginative. Social media marketing in particular must rely on a trigger effect: Make it interesting, keep their attention, and drive your audience to take action.

Tracking is another important aspect to any type of marketing. Many social media marketers seem to be of the mindset that tracking and analytics in social media is impossible. It isn’t. It’s also necessary.

And if you aren’t building relationships with your fans, then what are you doing on social media? Just saying.

Finally, let the experts do what they do best. You focus on your core business and let the social media experts focus on theirs. There’s no better way to succeed.

That doesn’t mean those links are dead. It means you’ll see a gradual decline in links after that half-life has expired. The recommendation is for you to submit “second chance” links to allow other followers who didn’t see the first one an opportunity to see your links. That’s a suggestion made by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land.

There’s another reason you want to send out these “second chance” shares as well. You want to test another teaser message.

Remember, what you say (the reason you give for your followers needing to click a link) about a link determines to a great degree whether or not a link is clicked on. With a second chance share, you can test another teaser and capture clicks from people who saw the first link but weren’t intrigued by your teaser message.

Either way you look at it, tweeting and sharing the same information more than once is becoming a common practice. I’ve seen marketers share the same message across multiple days. The reason they do so is because they get more click-throughs.

Here are three ways to make the most of your competition’s marketing efforts on Facebook:

1. Join their Facebook page – Many businesses spend all of their Facebook time managing their page and marketing through their page. If your competition has a Facebook page, join it. Check it often for updates and subscribe to their Networked blog if they have one.
2. Sign for their app – Many businesses are developing their own Facebook apps. You should use those apps because they can be a clue as to what your competition might be considering next. Many apps tools later become marketplace offerings.
3. Executive profiles – If you can get the names of your competition’s top executives, look to see if they have profiles. If so, send them a friend request. If necessary, send a friend request from a fake account or have your sister’s cousin do it instead. Be sneaky, but legal.

Competitive intelligence is alive and well, even on Facebook. Embrace it.

This is a rather lame analysis on the differences between Facebook and StumbleUpon, but Cynthia Boris is right on one point, at least. Facebook was not designed to be a link sharing site – StumbleUpon was. So what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Look at this like this. These numbers represent an aggregate of users. StumbleUpon now drives 50% of social media traffic referral in the U.S. while Facebook dipped down below 42%. Guess what? Search engine traffic is still up around 60% of website referrals. When seen in that light, both StumbleUpon and Facebook pale in comparison.

Still, let’s get back to StumbleUpon and Facebook. SU has been a heavy driver of traffic for years. But most Internet marketers know that traffic doesn’t convert well. Facebook is better for branding. Plus, because of its social networking features, the ability to build brandable pages, and Facebook’s app development features, the largest social media website on the planet is much, much better for small business branding.

Besides that, you’ll have to do your own comparisons for your own website. Many website owners can use StumbleUpon very effectively. Others find great success with Facebook. Aggregate totals say nothing about your ability to leverage any particular social media website.

There’s nothing wrong with StumbleUpon touting its success. And there’s nothing wrong with being a little critical of it too. StumbleUpon is a good source of traffic if you keep in mind what it’s good for.

For instance, if you are logged into Facebook, you can go to Bing and see what your Facebook friends like. On YouTube, or anywhere.

Google, in an attempt to face off with Bing, created its own social network called Google+. When you conduct a Google search, beside each search result you’ll see a +1 button. If you +1 an item and you set your preferences on Google+ just right, then your friends will be able to see what you plussed on your Google+ profile page, and you they.

But Google takes it another step further than that even. On the search results page, you can see what items your friends have shared on Google+ and you can see other items they have shared on any social network – including Facebook.

Are these social signals exhaustive? Not by any means. In fact, they are just the beginning.

Social search is in its infant stage. I believe social signals in search will become much more important and we are only getting started. It will be exciting to see where the search engines of the future will take us. I can hardly wait to get there.