Facebook pages can now target posts by country, city or language.  This gives you far more control over who sees your updates and allowing you to maintain a worldwide presence from a single page.

To use this new feature enter your update and then click the drop down box next to the share button. Select customise to bring up the “choose your audience” screen.

On the “choose your audience” screen you can enter the audience you wish to target, be that a single city where you are running a special offer, or a specific language group you wish to send a translated message to.

We have already used this feature with one of our clients, an international recording artist but there may be other, more local uses, or even just for fun as in the example below.

One drawback is that you cannot exclude one particular location easily but you can include multiple locations, although this could become a lengthy process.

The advantage of being able to target in this way is that your messages remain relevant regardless of the size of your fan base. This is one of the key benefits of permission marketing and makes Facebook much more useful as a platform.

Let us know how you have used this new feature in the comments, or catch us on Facebook.

We have been keeping an eye on Twitter’s Project Retweet for a while now, so when Mashable broke the news that retweets had been spotted in the wild we scanned our accounts and found that one of our test accounts has the feature enabled!

Retweeting is where you post the content of a tweet from someone you follow into your own stream for your followers to see. In the past this has been facilitated through adding RT @username to the beginning of a post to signify that the content was originally posted by someone else. Now Twitter has integrated this process into the system, which means the original content will remain intact and the act of sharing becomes a two click process rather than the copy-paste effort required before.

The feature works like this:

When you hover your mouse over the post you want to retweet you will see the retweet option. Click this and confirm the dialogue.

When you have retweeted the post your name will be listed underneath the post. There is an option to undo the tweet if you wish.

The retweeted post will appear in your feed.

The feature is being rolled out progressively so keep an eye out for strange tweets in your feed. For now posts retweeted with the function will appear like regular retweets to anyone whose account hasn’t had the new feature activated.

When the feature is activated you will be able to choose whether you receive retweets from each of the people you follow. If you are receiving retweets you will see other peoples tweets in your feed, complete with their avatar and name.

This is a huge feature for Twitter which should make it far easier for your message, and brand, to spread. Your full tweet will appear anywhere it is retweeted, including a link back to your profile.

This feature is now available for many accounts in the UK. Below is how it looks when a retweet appears in your feed.

To read more about the retweet feature, check out this retweet guide from mashable.

More than half of social network users become a fan or a follower of a brand on social networks. Most of these people seek out the brand themselves, or find them through suggestions from friends.

Once someone becomes a fan of your brand they are opting in to receive your content directly into their home feed. This gives you an unique opportunity to engage with the people who use your products or services.

Because Facebook is an interactive medium where people are used to speaking to each other, it allows you to add a bit of personality to your brand and to find out what your fans want to see. If your brand has a mascot, such as Compare the Market’s Aleksander Orlov, it can be fun to take on that character for your communications, but even if you only have people in your office you can still keep your fans updated with what you are up to. Check out our blog on Great Facebook Content for ideas.

To make the most out of your Facebook page the first thing you need is some consistent branding. Our blog on Creating a Consistent Brand Image across Social Networks should help get you on your way.

Now to start providing some content!

Do you have pictures of your products? Pictures of an office event, or maybe some videos on YouTube? All this can be added to your Facebook Page. If you already have a YouTube account and don’t want to re-load all of your videos on to Facebook, I would suggest the Involver App for Facebook Pages.

If you have a promotion on your website you can use the static FBML application to add content boxes to your page. Check out our blog on adding bespoke content to Facebook pages.

Now that your page is looking fancy, the only thing that’s left is to promote it. Get yourself a Vanity URL and place a button on your website linking through to Facebook, add a link to your Newsletter or even take up an ad on Facebook.

Once you start to gather fans more will follow as they will automatically provide their friends  with exposure to your content. To maximise this exposure you will need to engage your fans with your content so that they will like, comment and share your content.

As a general rule attempt to make any update at least a paragraph of text. The more you write there more likely it is that someone will feel the need to comment. You should try to enrich your post with media such as photos, a video or a link.

Try not to link to your website too much as this could cause people to hide your posts from their stream. Think of Facebook as a place to improve your relationship with your customers, rather than a direct sales path.

Facebook have released an application to post your Facebook content direct to Twitter.

Head to http://www.facebook.com/twitter and you can enable Facebook to Twitter postings for Status Updates, Photos, Links, Notes and/or Events.

This means that you can post outside of the 140 character limit and have people click through to your Facebook page to see the rest of the message. It also means your rich content such as video and images are made available to your Twitter followers without you having to upload them to another service.

Beware, when using this Facebook will post some updates to Twitter as “I posted 7 photos on Facebook” rather than “We just posted 7 photos on Facebook”. Something to bear in mind if you usually post using “we”.

A vanity URL is a short link to your Facebook Fan Page, for example, http://www.facebook.com/signupto

You can register your short URL at Facebook.com/username. This page allows you to set your own personal URL as well as the URL for any page you manage.

You can only set your URL once, so think carefully about what to use. We chose ours as signupto (as opposed to signup/signuptech) because we use the same for our Twitter account. Best keep these things consistent!

Once you have your URL why not include it in your newsletter or send out an email campaign to let people know.

You may have noticed this blog looks a little different. It isn’t just the blog that has had a new lick of paint however, our team have spent the last few weeks hard at work to bring you the brand new Sign-Up.to.

As well as the obvious cosmetic changes we have also altered a few of our sections and added some wonderful new features.

Our five steps of e-marketing have been re-vamped to be more relevant to our (and of course your) business. You can check this out in its illustrated form on the front page of Sign-Up.to but to summarise, Capture has become “Collect”, Track has made way for the all new “Analyse” tool and we will soon have a brand new “Share” section where you can spread your message further using Social Media.

As well as the new website, we have also re-branded our Social Network pages. Check out our Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages.

We really hope you like our new look and that our new features will aid you in getting your message to the right person, in the right place, at the right time.

Facebook has just launched a new feature which is set to change the way we post and interact drastically.

One of Facebook’s most innovative and useful features is phototagging. Now they are bringing this functionality to posts and status updates so you can tag friends in your messages as you would with @replies on Twitter.

On Twitter this is made possible through the typing of a username or through the reply button; on Facebook you can search through your friends and add them directly.

The consequence of this change for page admins is that fans won’t have to visit your page to make a comment or to interact with your brand and you can now tag events, groups and people in your status updates.

See an explaination of Status Tagging from Facebook on CNN

Check out Mashable’s Tutorial on using Status Tagging.

Facebook appears to be, on the surface of things, the least customisable social network in terms of design, particularly in comparison to Myspace or Youtube, However, due to its modular nature and the application platform it is surprisingly easy to add custom content to your Facebook page.

The most useful application for adding content to your pages is Facebook’s own Static FBML application.

This application allows you to add HTML to your page, either as full tabs or profile boxes. There are some limitations but I find it is very similar to coding for Email. In the example below I will explain how to add a promotional button to your Facebook wall.

You will want to prepare your image beforehand, You can make it as tall as you like but the maximum width is 180px to fit onto the wall tab.

Browse to the application and add the application to your page.

Now navigate to your page and click the edit page button, look for the Static FBML box and select edit from the menu.

Here we will add a title for the box and our HTML. The code below will add an image and link it back to Sign-Up.to. You can create your own HTML in Dreamweaver or even the Sign-Up.to editor if you like, or simply change the code below to insert your own image and link.

<a href=” INSERT YOUR LINK HERE “><img src=” INSERT IMAGE LOCATION HERE ” alt=” INSERT A DESCRIPTION OF YOUR IMAGE HERE “/> </a>

TIP: If you need somewhere to host your image, upload it to Facebook and copy the image path by right clicking the image and selecting properties.

Once your box is created, go to your boxes tab and click the pencil in the corner of the box, now select ‘move to wall’

Facebook is a unique opportunity to put your content directly into the home feed of your Facebook Fans. To make the most of this your content needs to be valuable and engaging. Most of this is going to be specific to your business and it is only through knowing your userbase (something Facebook Insights can help with) that you will be able to gauge exactly what kind of content will resonate with your users, but here are a few examples.

Aleksandr Orlov – Founder of Compare the Meerkat

Compare the Market’s Aleksandr Orlov is a great character and suits Facebook perfectly. The benefit of an offline presence means he is instantly recognisable if you notice his face in your highlights due to friends interacting with him.

Aleksandr posts daily with amusing topical content and it works, as you can see from the screenshot  below.

By following up the original scrabble content and reacting to the comments Aleksandr was able to achieve over 4,000 ‘Likes’ and 500+ comments, far higher than average. The link takes users through to the discussion tab on Aleksandr’s page where over 4,000 people signed the petition.

With 4,000 interactions and an average of 200 friends per person the reach from this content is about 800,000 people and we can see that the click through on the link is as high as the amount of likes.

Starbucks Coffee Company

Starbucks are another company who have a great offline presence but they are using social media to expand their online reach as well as driving foot traffic through their stores.

Starbucks listened to their fans and provided redemption vouchers to use in stores. In the case of the ‘Free Pastry Day’  Starbucks have created an event. This has a few key benefits.  It is instantly shareable in a way people are used to.  They can be invited to take part in ‘Free Pastry Day’ rather than being sent an easy to forget voucher in a message. The other benefit of an event is that it gives greater visibility: not only will it show up in the highlights of anyone who is friends with an attendee, a reminder will also be placed on the home screen of anyone who is invited for a few days before the event.

Even though this was a US only initiative the event had almost 600,000 attendees and 1,000,000 people were invited in total. This has helped Starbucks become one of the most followed brands on Facebook with almost 4 million fans.

Adidas Originals

Adidas have a mix of fresh content such as celebrity videos, special events and competitions but where they perform best is with product announcements. Adidas are a clothing company so it stands to reason that their fans would want to see their products.

By posting pictures of their products to Facebook, Adidas get 7,000+ likes and get their products (and the links to buy them) seen by people who want to see them.

For more examples of Great Facebook Content, check out Mashable’s post on Killer Facebook Fan Pages.

One of the key elements of your Social Media Strategy should be creating a consistent brand image across all platforms. This is often a daunting task due to the various limitations of each platform but in this article I’m going to show you how a consistent image can be obtained easily.

I’ll lead with Facebook as this is the least customisable platform.

You have very little to work with except the profile picture. You can add custom boxes to the left sidebar, but that is another topic entirely!

The profile picture can be up to 200px wide and 600px high, giving you plenty of screen real estate to work with. You should aim to fit your company logo into a 175px x 175px space, as this is the maximum section of your image which will fit into the thumbnail shown next to your posts.

Twitter gives us more customisation options, but is limited by an 800k file size on the left aligned background image.

Twitter allows us to change the colours of the sidebar, text and links as well as the dividing line between the main content and the sidebar itself. You can set these up to match your company colours, but beware of the contrast ratio if using a dark sidebar and light text as this may make your centre content less readable.

When creating your background image you need to be aware that the image will be left aligned, while the main content is centre aligned. This means that depending on the screen resolution the content could sit anywhere across your background giving you have very little room to place content.

On a 1024×768 display you have about 120px to work with either side of the main content, while on 1280×1024 you have around twice that. You can see the difference below

You will notice that the text on the right hand side of the main content is larger on the second image, to create this effect we actually place two pieces of text on the page, with the smaller of the two being covered by the centre column on larger displays.

To make sure everything lines up correctly, set up a new document 1280px wide and 1024px high. Mark three vertical lines, one at 125px, one at 885px and one at 1050px. Now mark a horizontal line at 60px from the top. This gives us our three margins and ensures that the smaller text will be hidden beneath the top of the centre column.

Twitter pages can become quite long, to extend your page downwards with a block colour to avoid the background repeating.

Like Twitter, YouTube allows us to change the colour scheme and add our own custom background. With YouTube however, the background image is centred and the file size is limited to 256k.

Because the background is centred and so is the content we can make our image any size and have everything stay in the same place. A 1900px square should ensure that there is no overlap on larger screens.

Create your image with vertical lines at 195px, 345px, 1305px and 1455px.  The two thin columns created are where your content should sit to be visible either side of the centre column. Again, style the colour scheme to match your site, but be careful of making text unreadable by choosing poor contrast.