In this video I interview Christi McNeil, emerging media specialist and spokesperson for Southwest Airlines. She handles the online media relations and is the voice behind the Southwest Airlines Twitter account.

Christi talks about how to use social media to connect with customers by sharing behind-the-scenes stories, covering breaking news and seizing opportunities to connect with customers on a deeper level.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How the Nuts About Southwest blog was created as a platform to share behind-the-scenes stories
• Why their blog is manned with one main blog editor and a team of 30 bloggers throughout the organization
• What type of content the bloggers share to engage customers
• How social media has helped Southwest Airlines differentiate itself from the competition
• How to use Twitter to build one-on-one interaction with your audience
• How to use Facebook to build community conversation with live streaming content and by featuring fare offers and promotions

Christi’s biggest tip: Allow your employees to have a voice and establish this early on in the social space.

Connect with Christi on Twitter at @southwestair and also at @christimcneill.

How does your company connect with customers on social media? What tips do you have to share about creating community conversations online? Please share them below.

Do you want to get the most from Twitter?  Because Twitter is so quick and easy to use, it’s also easy to get lost in the conversations.

Here are four tips to help you focus your Twitter efforts to get the maximum benefits for your business.

#1: Define your business goals and objectives

Take something you want to accomplish in your business and break it down into action items that are measurable and specific.

You might have a business goal to increase your business visibility so potential customers can discover you. Your next step is to create several objectives to put this goal into action, for example:

• Use Twitter to reach out to potential customers who live or work within 3 miles of your location.
• Use Twitter to share your dinner special on Tuesday nights in June.
• Use Twitter to talk with neighbors about an upcoming community event for 3 weeks before and 1 week after the event.

Here's an example of sharing about dinner specials.

An objective describes what you’ll do and how you’re going to measure your success toward meeting your goal. You may want to add in other numbers related to outcome of your activity. However, those numbers depend on factors outside your control.

For example:

• You don’t know how many Twitter users live and work within 3 miles of your business.
• You don’t know how many people will visit on Tuesday nights based on your tweets.
• You don’t know how many people will be talking about the community event on Twitter.

When you’re starting out in social media, it’s best to focus your objectives on something you can control: your behavior. Create objectives that guide your online behavior and watch how your community responds. Over time, you can fine-tune your actions so you can get the best responses from your community.

Your business goals and objectives are the backbone for measuring your Twitter success. If you don’t already have Twitter goals and objectives, take a few minutes now to write down the practical ways that Twitter can help your business.

#2: Create your conversation strategy

It’s not enough to follow people. If you really want to build a Twitter community around your business, you need give people a reason to follow you back and engage in conversation with you.

People will follow you if you talk about things that interest them. Of course, you can talk about your business, offer discounts and exclusive specials, share practical tips and announce your business products and services. Be mindful that you need to talk about things that others find interesting if you want to build a community.

Choose your conversation topics carefully because it’s important that you really care about these topics. People can tell if you really have passion for a subject, or if you’re just showing up to sell them something.

If you were having a dinner party, you’d spend some time cleaning up your house. In the same way, take some time to think through your conversation strategy and put it in place before you invest time searching for new people to follow. This way, when people check your Twitter profile, they can see what you talk about, how much you promote your business and how often you talk about other things. It’s important that you create a good first impression when people look at your tweet stream.

#3: Organize your community with Twitter Lists

Before you expand your Twitter community, invest a little time to organize your existing community with Twitter Lists. Twitter Lists help you focus on conversation streams. If you haven’t used the lists feature, Twitter provides a great overview on how to create lists and manage the people on your lists.

Twitter gives you a great overview on how to use Twitter Lists.

There are no rules about how to break up your community into lists. Do whatever seems smart to you. You could create a list that groups together people who tweet in your neighborhood, another list for customers and yet another for businesses in your industry. You might want to see how other businesses are organizing people into lists before you finalize your strategy.

Here's an example of how a business broke out their local community into several Twitter Lists.

Twitter allows you to create public or private lists.

• Private lists. You’re the only person who knows about your private lists and who is on them. You can edit your lists (add or remove people) without anyone seeing your actions. Many people create a private list for the people they talk with most on Twitter.
• Public lists. Public lists are the most common and have many benefits. People love being on lists. Anyone can view and follow your public lists and you can follow public lists created by other people.

Create your lists and organize your current Twitter community. Add each new person you follow to the appropriate list when you follow them.

Use the list button to add each new person you follow to the appropriate list.

Many Twitter tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck allow you to create separate columns for each list. This makes it easy to follow and join in conversation streams.

HootSuite allows you to create a conversation stream from a Twitter List.

#4: Keep expanding your Twitter community

Community management, the process of adding and removing people from your Twitter community, is an ongoing activity. Set aside some time each week to maintain your Twitter community.

Start small and build over time. For example, you might set an initial objective to find 10, 20, or 50 new people to follow each week depending on your business goals and your available time.

It’s important that you don’t follow too many new people at one time. Twitter spammers aggressively follow a large number of people in short bursts. If you act like a spammer, someone might report you as such and Twitter might suspend your account!

Twitter monitors how aggressively users follow other users.

In your weekly community management, set aside a little time to review your new followers. Rather than sending an autoreply direct message (DM) to new followers, why not look over the profile and tweet stream of each new follower and write a customized, personal message? To be a good community member, connect with your community as a real person and build your relationships one at a time.

What’s your experience with Twitter? Do you have a community management strategy? Share your experience in the comments box below.

In the competitive world of search engine optimization (SEO), your business blog is a critical tool for your success.

Why is blogging so important to your search engine visibility? Because search engines serve up web pages—not websites—when people ask a question. And here’s the important part:

Every blog post is a new web page and every web page is another opportunity to rank well for another search term.

More groundbreaking than E=mc2!

In other words, every time you blog on a subject you want to rank well for, you create another opportunity for your best prospects to find you.

What You Need to Get Started

There are three things required for you to succeed in your business blogging:

• Use the right blogging platform. While I don’t believe that you can’t succeed using platforms such as Joomla, Drupal or TypePad, my recommendation for blogging is WordPress. It’s powerful, easy to learn and has plenty of SEO plugins that increase your chances of topping the search engine results.
• Own your domain. Don’t run a business blog from an address like mycompany.typepad.com or mycompany.wordpress.com. When you do that, you’re just building up trust and inbound links to someone else’s property. You want to blog from your own property, such as mycompany.com/blog or mycompanyblog.com. This is also critical in case you ever decide to move to another blogging platform as it allows you to retain all the inbound links you’ve gathered over the years.
• Be committed. Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight; it’s not like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising where you can immediately appear on the first page of Google. However, it also lasts a lot longer. PPC ends the day you stop paying, while my company has blog posts written years ago that still deliver hundreds of new leads each month. That’s great ROI!

Posts from as far back as 2006 still drive thousands of new visitors each month to our company blog.

What Affects Your Search Engine Ranking?

All search engines have a unique algorithm for determining how relevant your blog post is to a given query. To oversimplify this process, it comes down to two main factors:

• On-page optimization: how the words in your post match up with the search that was just done, and
• Off-page optimization: how many quality inbound links you have (links from other websites, blogs, directories, etc. to your blog post)

How to Improve Your On-Page Optimization

If you want to create content that’s relevant to your business, answers your prospects’ questions and helps you rank higher, there’s a simple three-step process to help you get there:

1.     Brainstorm your keyword phrases. Whether you do this by yourself, include co-workers or survey your current clients, you should start by brainstorming as many keyword phrases—the words you want to rank well for or you believe your prospects are searching for—as you can.

2.     Test your beliefs. Too often we think we know what our prospects are searching for, but we’re off the mark. If you’re blogging about divorce lawyers and everyone out there is searching for how to save my marriage, you’re not helping anyone.

You’ll want to use keyword analysis tools like Raven Tools, Keyword Discovery or Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help you determine what people are searching.

All of these tools work in a similar fashion: they determine how many people are searching for your phrases, and how much competition you have for each phrase. You want to first target the phrases that have good search volume, but maybe don’t have as much competition.

Bacon queries at Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

The keyword phrases most likely to bring home the bacon for your business. #groan

3.     Start blogging! Running sneakers gathering dust in your closet don’t make you fit, and keywords you’re not using won’t get you good rankings. Start creating new blog posts of 300–700 words 2–3 times a week.

Blogging for Search Engine Success

While knowing what keywords to target is half the battle, here are a few tips to maximize your results:

• Start your post title with your best keywords. Page titles are the most important variable in how well you’ll rank. Search engines give more weight to the first three or four words in your title, so you’ll get better results from titling your post Super Bowl Commercial Reviews: The Best and Worst Ads, as opposed to What I Thought of Last Night’s Super Bowl Ads.
• Use your keyword phrase through the body of the post. Try to use your phrase in the first sentence or two, and then a couple of more times in the post. Put it in your meta-description, the meta-tags, the image alt-tags, the post tags and anywhere else that seems appropriate.
• Link to appropriate pages on your website. If you’re blogging about the boots some B-list celebrity wore on some reality show last night, make sure you link the boot name to the page on your website where they can buy those boots. If you’re blogging about how to retain employees, make sure you link “employee recognition” to your page on employee reward programs. This will help increase the search visibility of your web pages; just make sure you link your keywords, not “click here” or “learn more.”

E-commerce sites can benefit from blogging around their customers' interests.

SEO Tools and Plugins

Here are a few tools to help you create posts that will rank well and attract qualified clients to your blog:

Keyword Questions: Struggling with blogger’s block? This tool from WordTracker returns popular search engine queries based on your keywords.

Each result is another post for your blog.

All In One SEO Pack: One of many plugins that improve your blog’s optimization, this is the one I use on my own web marketing blog. This plugin allows you to easily add unique meta-descriptions, meta-tags and titles to each post, improve the page title format and reduce the chances that the search engines will get confused by duplicate content on your blog.

Use SEO plugins to improve your titles and meta-information.

Scribe SEO: Scribe is a plugin for WordPress that requires a monthly fee. Once installed, you can run keyword analysis on each post from directly within the admin. Scribe will also score your blog post before you post it, and suggest improvements.

Scribe shows you where you can improve.

It will also suggest other blog posts and social media resources that may be sources of inbound links to your post.

Off-Page Optimization

As mentioned earlier, the other half of the search engine equation is inbound links: links from other web pages to your blog posts.

Search engines see inbound links as “votes of confidence.” The more quality incoming links, the more confidence that the search engines have that you’re providing a valuable resource to their searchers.

Not all inbound links are created equal, however. There are a number of variables that affect how important each link is.

• The linking site: sites deemed trustworthy will provide more value than new or untrustworthy sites.
• The number of links on the referring page: each page has a limited amount of “link juice” to pass on. If you cut a pie into four pieces, everyone gets a good-sized piece of pie. If you cut that pie into four hundred pieces, everyone goes home hungry.
• The context of the linking page: If you’re blogging about burritos, a link from a taco blog will give you a bigger boost than one from a bicycle blog, all other things being equal.
• The anchor text: the words in the link are critical.

Admittedly, you often won’t have any control over these variables, but Google and Bing take them into consideration. Which begs the question…

How Do You Get More Incoming Links?

Ah, I thought you’d never ask. The obvious—and aggravating—answer is create quality content that’s valuable to your audience. If people find your content valuable, they’ll share it and link to it.

That being said, here are some techniques for getting more inbound links:

• Numbered lists: People love numbered lists. We don’t have time to master any new skills here, but you can boil it down to 6 Tips for Starting an Online Community, 21 Ways Non-Profits Can Leverage Social Media, or 50 Creative Uses of QR Codes in Marketing & Communications.
• How-to articles: Most of us use the search engines because we don’t know how to accomplish some goal or task. Get even more links by embedding a video in your how-to post.

Videos make how-to posts even more link-worthy.

• Guest blog: Blog at a related blog—bonus points if it’s more well-read and influential than your own! From your guest post you can create keyword-rich links to your blog or website. If you’re not sure where to start your guest blogging, check out My Blog Guest, a marketplace for guest blogging.

In conclusion:

• Perform a keyword analysis to know which keywords will drive qualified traffic to your site.
• Put your keywords in your titles, content and throughout your post.
• Create content that will encourage people to link to your blog.

This post just skimmed the surface of what you can do to improve your search engine visibility and drive more qualified traffic to your blog. What techniques and successes have you had with your blog and search engines? Please share your stories in the comments box below!

These days we can get our daily news through a multitude of resources from across the web.

But LinkedIn Today is the new player in town for the professional community. Plus, it’s a great resource for putting your daily news in the context of your professional social network.

As LinkedIn describes it, LinkedIn Today allows you to discover what the world’s professionals are reading, sharing AND tweeting. Bottom line, it’s a professional social news source that you can utilize to grow your social influence.

The Top News From Your Industry Curated by the People

The power of LinkedIn Today is that the top articles are showcased based on how often they’ve been shared by the professionals within a variety of industries. There’s no editor. These articles are curated by LinkedIn members!

Not only will LinkedIn Today show you the top headlines that LinkedIn members are interested in by industry or news source, you can also see what some of those members have to say about the articles when they include comments. (I would highly recommend including your own comments on EVERYTHING you share.)

You can see who shared each headline.

For each headline that appears, you can see how many times the article has been shared, and you can even filter the most recent shares by company, industry or location. It’s important to note that currently LinkedIn will only show you the most recent shares and this is updated frequently.

How does LinkedIn determine which articles get visibility on LinkedIn Today?

What makes LinkedIn Today so powerful is that the news articles displayed are those that have been shared, liked or commented on the most by LinkedIn members. Articles are sorted by industry and news source, based on the industry assigned to profiles of those who have shared them.

Most importantly, LinkedIn will give a higher preference to more recent articles if they’re being shared quickly by a broad base of members. LinkedIn Today will also show you top industry articles from StumbleUpon and even articles that your direct LinkedIn connections have shared.

LinkedIn Today pulls in popular articles by industry from StumbleUpon.

LinkedIn Today shows articles shared by your connections!

3 Steps for Using LinkedIn Today to Build Influence

There are many ways to build social relationships with your LinkedIn connections. One of the best ways to grow your social influence is to consistently curate and share timely, relevant content with your connections so you stay visible and valuable.

Remember, with all of the content now available online, people are overloaded with information but they’re thirsting for knowledge. Position yourself as someone who is “in the know” within the context of your industry to become an influencer.

#1: Customize LinkedIn Today

The first action to take with LinkedIn Today is to customize and organize your news page to show you the most relevant articles based on your industry, interests and sources. LinkedIn Today allows you to follow categories of news that you and your connections care about most.

I recommend you follow your industry, related industries and any and all sources that can help you grow your reputation as an influencer. For example, my industry is financial services and this is my target market. However, the content I specialize in is marketing and social media. It makes sense for me to follow industries and sources related to both so that I can provide a blend of relevant content to my audience.

Follow relevant industries, interests and sources to see applicable articles.

Furthermore, I love a good story from NPR and I also believe that the Harvard Business Review provides some excellent leadership content, so I follow these sources as well and share appropriate content with my network. The point is to mix it up and create a blend of valuable sources that can help you stay visible and valuable in your niche markets.

#2: Scan your LinkedIn Today headlines daily

I love the fact that LinkedIn provides you with the option to receive daily email updates from LinkedIn Today. Let’s face it, with a weekly news digest you can certainly keep tabs on what’s happened in your industry, but that news will get old fast. If you want to be an influencer, you’ll need to get daily updates so you can quickly scan and identify the most interesting and relevant news and content to share with your connections in a timely fashion.

Update your email setting to receive daily email updates from LinkedIn Today. In addition, I would recommend visiting LinkedIn Today a few times daily for news and updates that you may have missed. It’s really a one-stop shop for news that matters to your professional social network!

Go to the "Settings" link under your name on your LinkedIn home page to set up email notification.

Set your email preferences to receive a daily digest email.

#3: Share relevant articles from LinkedIn Today

It’s one thing to share a link to content with your social connections, but sharing alone will not help you grow your influence. You must consistently share AND comment in order to expand your visibility and engage your connections.

For each article that appears on LinkedIn Today, you’ll see a small people icon with a number next to it (see below). This indicates how many people have shared that particular article on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you click on the icon, a window will appear showing the profile pictures of who most recently shared the article from LinkedIn or Twitter and what their comments were, if any.

This icon shows you the number of times the link has been shared on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Whether an article has been shared by many or few, if it can be valuable and relevant to your network, go ahead and share it and always remember to include your own comments. Anything that you share will show up in your social streams, and also any of the LinkedIn Groups you decide to share the article with. Sharing high-quality content and commentary with your LinkedIn Groups is a great way to start a new discussion and add value!

Share the article with your followers; filter the most recent shares.

Currently there’s no way to reply to comments or retweet links directly from the most recent shares. This would be a nice feature that could increase engagement, in particular with those people who may be in your industry but not connected to you.

If you’re connected to a member, you’ll be able to click through to his or her profile and reply or comment directly on what was shared. You can also view the profiles of people who have recently shared an article in your industry and determine if you have any common connections!

If you share AND comment on articles from LinkedIn Today with your LinkedIn connections, Groups and Twitter network, you have a tremendous opportunity to be consistently visible and valuable to your network. Yes, LinkedIn has done a lot of the heavy lifting by curating headlines for you, but you can take this to the next level by curating further for your own network! Add your layer of professionalism and insight in order to grow your social influence.

Because LinkedIn Today is updated very frequently, it’s a curation tool that also provides you with a high-quality resource to leverage for consistent visibility. If you want to stay relevant to your target markets, you must be consistently visible! If you’re frequently sharing interesting articles and news from your industry, you’ll build influence. In addition, you might also gain further exposure by showing up on the actual LinkedIn Today page!

LinkedIn Today will continue to expand as more industries are added, and as more professionals begin to utilize the site as a social news resource. This is one of the many LinkedIn tools that have been developed to help you become more connected with the other professionals in your industry and beyond.

You can use LinkedIn Today to help you grow your visibility with a conscious daily effort. To learn more about LinkedIn Today, I would recommend going through the overview provided by the LinkedIn Today team.

Personally I’ve made LinkedIn Today one of my first stops in the morning to see what news has surfaced in the industries and from the sources that I care about, and that my followers care about.

What do you think about LinkedIn Today? What tips can you share? Leave your comments in the box below.

There’s an old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Twitter is a paradox that redefines that old saying to, “If it’s broke, don’t fix it, because it works.”

For all intents and purposes, Twitter shouldn’t work, yet 200 million people (and bots) have created accounts in this thriving information egosystem. Now, news no longer break, it Tweets. Celebrities use it daily to connect directly with fans and also augment their income streams. Politicians and governments use Twitter to communicate with constituents and one another. Everyday people rely on Twitter to find information and share experiences. And for those more “influential” Twitter users, connectedness pays off in the form rewards, recognition, and compensation.

Twitter has evolved into a human seismograph that channels the pulse of business, politics, entertainment, news, and culture into the mobile phones and PCs and defines of our connected society. Twitter is a public confessional where screens become the window to self-expression, validation, recognition, with each contributing to a digital form of self confidence. And it is this new assurance that guides our actions in the real world. I Tweet therefore I am…whatever I want to become.

Indeed, Twitter shouldn’t work, but it does. What started as a hybrid public messaging service meets social network, is now a flourishing information network where people connect and disconnect based on interests and fleeting moments of intellectual, sophomoric and parallel intimacy. As such, Twitter forces the evolution of social networking from social graphs to interest graphs, where people are not only connected to those they know, but also those who share their interests.

While it’s often chided for its ability to assemble and syndicate irrelevant, irresponsible, and questionable activity, Twitter excels in aligning relevance with those who understand how to filter streams to their advantage. And this is where things start to get interesting, as I don’t believe we’ve seen Twitter’s true impact on our digital and IRL culture.

Twitter’s Awareness vs. Adoption

The state of the Twitterverse is in flux. Capturing its shape, genetic makeup and direction is akin to measuring the development of a baby in a womb. It’s growing, quickly, and even though we know that a baby will arrive and grow into a human being, we never know exactly who this person will ultimately become nor can we be certain of its personality through each of the development stages.

Twitter’s challenge with awareness versus adoption has plagued the fledgling company since the beginning. One of the top Google searches for Twitter after all is “I don’t get Twitter.”

The Pew Internet & American Life Project announced in June 2011 that Twitter usage rose from 8% of US Internet users in Fall 2010 to 13% in May 2011. Representing an impressive 62% spike in adoption, many question the significance of the bump in its migration toward mainstream adoption. As eMarketer recently wrote, Twitter has a problem with Awareness vs. Usage.

Twitter’s awareness has greatly benefited from the nonstop media attention it receives due to controversial and high profile users. Citing Arbitron and Edison research, we see that 92% of consumers ages 12 and up are familiar with Twitter, but only 8% actually use it. According to this graph, Twitter has an adoption problem. In contrast, Facebook adoption ranks at 57.1% of internet users as stated by eMarketer.

As we know, numbers don’t lie. eMarketer also projects that Twitter advertising revenues will soar from $140 million in 2011 to $225 million in 2012.  In contrast, the once bursting place for friends, MySpace, will generate $184 million in ad revenue this year. As such, Twitter is focusing on improving (and defining) the user experience with Jack Dorsey rejoining the fold. And the company is building a sizable sales force. But even at this moment, Twitter has a model it can sell against. Since the launch of its Promoted products line, Twitter has worked with 600 advertisers on 6,000 campaigns. Twitter’s director of revenue Adam Bain puts things into perspective for optimists and skeptics alike, “Eighty percent of those marketers come back and buy from us again.”

Now, the cost of a Promoted Trends on Twitter has jumped from $100,000 to $120,000 per day. Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets are auction-based and a self-service model is due to arrive before the end of the year. Bain suggests that Twitter provides higher engagement levels that outperform not only traditional digital advertising products, but also Facebook ads.

In an interview with ClickZ, Bain reinforced the value of Promoted Products, “Paying $4 for a follower is a pittance because the ROI is insane. Because again once they have a follower, they can keep marketing to that guy as many times as they want without worrying about where they are across the web or what kind of mindframe they’re in.”

Certainly this is no mistake, but it is something that again, wasn’t anticipated. Attention has migrated to the stream and as we’re learning, that while money doesn’t grow on trees, it does in fact grow on Tweets.

Recently Mark Suster wrote about how the future of advertising will be integrated. In his post, Suster shared work by usability guru Jakob Nielsen that shows through heat maps where our eyes are focused.  Attention zeroes in on text and not the banners around it, thus introducing an era of banner blindness.

And in social media, banner blindness is equally prevalent. Facebook Ads sell against interests and people you know. Twitter sells products that appear within your line of sight – the stream, your new attention dashboard.

The Twitter Paradox is fascinating to study. I don’t believe mainstream adoption is a metric that matters to Twitter or to those who understand its benefits. Surely mass adoption is important to investors. But as a human network, we make the world a much smaller place, creating a global culture that connects people to information and events as they happen. And, through a stroke of fate or democratized serendipity, people effect how information travels and how events unfold. But at a minimum, Twitter has become an infinite well of incredible insight and intelligence and for that, it is already an indispensable service to businesses, governments, educators, and anyone who is impacted by the words and impressions of others.

Originally published on briansolis.com

Facebook is testing a new home page feature called “Happening Now,” which shows current status updates, likes and other FB activity from friends as they happen – a real-time feed, if you will, kind of like the Twitter timeline.

The main difference here is that it is not the main news feed, which should keep users from having a meltdown about the changes (as they have been known to do with past Facebook redesigns – or other redesigns for that matter).

Again, this is only a test at this point, and with very few people. According to Josh Constine at Inside Facebook, Facebook says the “test includes a small percentage of Facebook users,  just a fraction of a percent”.

It’s located where the “Upcoming Events” section normally appears. When you click on an update from there, it brings up a window that includes the post in full. Here’s a screenshot from AllFacebook:

Constine brings up some pretty interesting points about Facebook’s home page bounce rate, and how this could keep users engaged and on the page more, as it makes more content more immediately available for consumption. I can’t imagine that Facebook’s bounce rate is too bad as is, but I could see where this would help in that area.

There’s no telling if this will actually become a feature beyond the test. I’d have to see it in action before I could make any judgments about it, and I’m not in the small fraction of a percent, unfortunately, but I’d be curious to hear what readers think about the idea of this becoming a main feature of Facebook.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Facebook is estimated to have somewhere around 700 million users art this point. It was only 500 million when the marketing campaign for The Social Network launched last year.

How long until it reaches a billion? Leave your guess in the comments.

Facebook is seeing a great deal of growth in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, India, Columbia, Egypt, Turkey, and the UK. Facebook has become the top place for communication, photos, games, charity, and news for a lot of people already, and we’ve not even come closer to seeing the limit of what will be done using the social network. One of the interesting things about Facebook’s growth is that the more things people are able to do with Facebook, the more it is likely to grow still. And the company hasn’t even had an IPO yet.

We’ve seen plenty of glimpses into the future of Facebook – things that are being done on a modest scale, which will likely blow up in time (e-commerce, payments, videos, travel, etc.) As Facebook’s growth continues, more businesses are going to feel comfortable using it as a platform of operation, or at least as a major component of it.

E-Commerce

We’ve already seen e-commerce on Facebook increase over the last year or so, with more businesses setting up storefronts on Facebook itself, but I expect this to grow much more significantly over the coming years. It will be like selling merchandise through websites used to be. At first, many businesses didn’t offer their actual products through their sites, but now, most do. This will likely be the case on Facebook too, and it might not even take as long.

Most businesses have already recognized the benefits of at least having a Facebook Page, and given the ease of setting one up, compared to creating (and maintaining) a website, it’s not hard to see why wider adoption came so quickly.

We recently ran an article by Krishna De, who discussed nine tips to increase your social commerce success:

1. Have an attractive image for your store
2. Make use of your profile photo
3. Add a customized tab on your Facebook page
4. Incentivize your Facebook fans
5. Mention your Facebook Store in a status update
6. Test the Facebook Store out yourself
7. Consider using Facebook Ads to build awareness
8. Mention the launch on your site
9. Encourage people who purchase to leave a recommendation

Identity

Identity is the key to everything Facebook does, and is a major component in every business, app, and website that associates itself with Facebook. It’s all about personalization, and last year when Facebook launched its Instant Personalization features and social plugins for websites, it truly took over the web. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a credible website that doesn’t have some kind of Facebook integration, even if it’s as small as simply the use of a “like” button.

Despite privacy concerns from many users, they still continue to use Facebook, and using Facebook they can log into and interact with other sites and apps, without having to create a separate account. It ups the convenience factor significantly, and reduces friction. This will continue to be key for future endeavors, and every facet of Facebook usage, whether that be paying for goods online or off, playing games and keeping your records, getting personalized news, keeping personalized music playlists, or whatever else.

Facebook faces competition from companies like Google and Twitter (more so now with Twitter’s integration into Apple’s iOS 5) in the area of identity, but Facebook has a huge lead here, particularly in how it relates to personalization and actual friend-related data.

Of course, you still need an email address to have a Facebook account.

Payments

It is the identity aspect of Facebook that lends it to payments. With Facebook Credits, the social network has its own currency, which one can easily envision becoming a widely adopted and acceptable form of payment given the rise of innovation in the mobile payments space for the physical world, the fact that so many sites are integrated with Facebook in the online world, and the fact that every business already wants you to “like us on Facebook”.

Imagine going to McDonald’s or Sears, and tapping your phone on a device at the register to pay with your Facebook Credits.

By the way, Facebook Credits will reportedly work with iTunes apps too.

Travel

There are 107 apps currently on Facebook listed under “Travel,” and that’s just internal Facebook apps – apps you access while on Facebook itself. That doesn’t include the Facebook integration Travel sites all over the web are employing. Look at what Delta Airlines is doing, for example. Its Ticket Counter app lets users check in online and access their boarding pass on Facebook within 24 hours of their departure. It also lets you check flight status, view trip details, and view skymiles.

Travel is just one aspect of life where the ubiquitousness of Facebook comes in handy, as those catering to that aspect (like Delta) are able to take advantage of your Facebook ID to provide you with a helpful service.

Given Microsoft and Facebook’s relationship, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more Facebook and Bing Travel integrations over time either.

Search

Speaking of Bing, and its partnership with Facebook, don’t be surprised to see Facebook become a much bigger part of the search market picture. Facebook has data that search engines crave already. Personalization is the name of the game, and nothing on the web can come close to delivering the kind of personalized experience Facebook can to those that use it.

We’ve talked at length about Facebook’s potential in search in the past, so I’m not going to go on and on about it here. I’ll simply give you a link or two. But suffice it to say, Facebook is very relevant to search, and search is very relevant to Facebook. It will be even more so, as more businesses and people flock to the social network.

Advertising

Businesses are already recognizing how powerful Facebook ads can be. I expect Facebook Ads to continue to grow as a more popular place for companies to advertise. The targeting based on all of the data Facebook has about users is simply too great.

Just this week, MerchantCircle put out results of a survey finding that 22% of local merchants have used Facebook ads, and two-thirds of them intend to do so again. That’s as they stand now. You have to consider that Facebook is going to continue to make new features available over time, and find ways to make ads even more attractive to advertisers. It’s highly unlikely that they think their work is done, and that they’re not going to improve.

That goes for Facebook as a whole, by the way. There’s no telling what Facebook and its pool of top engineering talent will come up with in time, that nobody’s even considered yet. Look at everything Google’s done in the last decade. Who knows what Facebook will have its hands in another ten years. By the way, much of that top talent has come from Google.

Entertainment

Obviously games are already an enormous part of Facebook use for a lot of people. One can’t help but wonder if it has even played a part in the cancellation of certain soap operas. Movies and music may be poised to make up an even greater part of the puzzle as well.

As you may know, Warner Bros. has already been testing Facebook movie rentals. You go to a fan page for a movie, and then, you can rent the movie from right there. It’s not at all hard to imagine this becoming commonplace in the industry.

Facebook has also been talking with various music services, according to reports. The product of these talks is rumored to be a tab/widget that would display a user’s most-played songs and provide an easy way for friends to hear them. People are already sharing music on Facebook all the time, whether that be through a YouTube video, a SoundCloud file, or other formats, and bands are already connecting with fans through their Pages.

Musicians are even charging Facebook credits for on-demand concert streams.

News

People are already getting a lot of their news from Facebook, and Facebook has been placing more emphasis on this side of things itself. If you’re doing all of these other things with your Facebook account, it only makes sense that you would get at least some of your news through this venue as well, by “liking” publications’ Pages, which share links and notes about stories, and through posts that Friends find worth passing on (including through Facebook’s social plugins – like the “like” button or the newer “send” button).

A couple months ago, Facebook announced the launch of new journalist resources and a series of events for journalists to come together and find new ways to better harness the social network for their craft. Of course Facebook has played a significant role in creating the news as well (see recent revolutions).

Acquisitions

Looking at Facebook’s list of recent acquisitions can give us hints as to what the company might be up to, though as they are often geared toward talent rather than product, we can only speculate until we see results. Recent acquisitions from Facebook include:

- Drop.io (file hosting and sharing)
- Rel8tion (mobile advertising)
- Beluga (group messaging)
- Snaptu (mobile app development)
- DayTurn (infographics)
- Sofa (mac apps)

What Will We be Using Facebook For in Five Years?

This is where I’d like to call upon feedback from our readers. I’m sure I’ve barely scraped the surface of what the future truly holds for this increasingly powerful company. I want to hear some ideas from you about what you think we’re in for. So, I ask you: what will people be using Facebook for five years from now, that they aren’t already using it for? What would you like to see Facebook do in the future that it doesn’t already do? What would you like to see it stop doing? Comment here.

Have you ever thought about just how strange your online activity is compared to your actual life? If the two have melded and you are unable to tell the difference anymore, I’m sorry, this won’t make any sense to you. But if you think about what we are comfortable doing on social networks compared to what we feel comfortable doing in public, it’s actually really funny.

As a promotional campaign for a new opera debuting this month comes a nice little video entitled “Can I Be Your Friend.” One man walks around and interacts with real people in the same manner we react with people on Facebook and Twitter. The results are entertaining.

The opera in question is called “Two Boys” and it is based around the topic of “internet crimes.” In fact its inspiration comes from a 2004 story about an internet-based crime. A 14-year-old boy apparently posed at a female spy online and convinced an older boy to kill someone for him. The person he was trying to get killed was actually himself, and he was attacked, suffering multiple stab wounds. The older boy feel in love with the younger boy, and more confusion ensued. See how murky the internet can get sometimes?

The Opera is from the mind of 28-year-old composer Nico Muhly and will premiere at London’s English National Opera on June 24th.

The promotional video available on YouTube asks if you’ve “ever thought what could go wrong” in your online life? A man walks around asking strangers to be his friend, if he can poke them, and sticking “like” post-its on everything he sees. In the end there is even a gag involving a pretty creepy interpretation of a common Twitter term.

Check it out: