Facebook has increased the limit of its status updates.

The social networking giant now has upped its limit to a massive 63,206 characters.

The increase will allow both users and businesses with official pages to post their longest messages yet.

Facebook’s status limit is now 400 times bigger than Twitter’s. Twitter is famous for restricting its status updates to 140 characters, marking an even more distinct contrast now between status provision on both sites.

Speculation as to the reasons behind Facebook’s increase is rife, with the social networking giant remaining relatively cagey about the development.
It is not the first time that Facebook has expanded its status character limit. In March earlier this year it upped the limit tenfold, from 500 to 5000. It has proceeded to increase this a further ten times in the ten months between then and now.

Incredibly, when Facebook was first made available to the general public, it only allowed status updates of 160 characters maximum.

In an official update, a Facebook spokesperson wrote: “You can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters, including status, group and wall posts.

“For reference, a novel has roughly 500,000 characters. This could be shared in nine posts.”

Younger employees are more influenced by the chance to use social media at work than the salary on offer when it comes to choosing where to work.

According to the second annual Cisco Connected World Technology Report, which surveyed more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, one in three college students and employees under the age of 30 would prioritise social media freedom over salary in accepting a job offer.

They also prized device flexibility (the ability to use mobile devices at work) and work mobility over their potential pay packet.

More than two of five college students (40%) and employees under 30 (45%) said they would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility.

Meanwhile, more than half of college students (56%) said that if they were offered a job by a company that banned access to social media, they would either not accept a job offer or would join and find a way to get around their employer’s IT policy.

The report was commissioned to assess the challenges faced by organisations as they attempt to balance the needs of their business with those of their employees in relation to internet usage, especially in the light of network demands, mobility issues and security risks.

For digital marketers it emphasises yet again the power of social media as a potential marketing tool for a younger demographic.

Nearly 90% of Facebook users say that they hate the new changes to the social media website.

The poll, conducted by community website SodaHead.com, also found that 91% of teenage users said that Facebook had worsened since the update.

If the figures were translated across Facebook’s user base, this would mean that the equivalent of 688million people preferred the social media site before it changed dramatically at the beginning of last month.

The changes included a Twitter-style news ticker at the top right-hand side of the page and a revamped news feed which many users have complained is more difficult to follow than its previous incarnation.

Nearly 80% of the site’s young users said that the website should get rid of the updates, with 89% of women and 78% of men in agreement with them.

The only group surveyed who approved of the changes were IT workers. Some 55% of those in the industry are pleased with the new-look Facebook. Beware web designers!  You may not automatically be on the same wavelength as the people you are designing for.

However, they were in the minority amongst the 1094 people who took part in the survey.

One respondent wrote on the website: “It sucks. Facebook needs to quit trying to ‘keep up with the Googles’ and just be the best version of Facebook.

“It worked because it was simple, uncluttered and didn’t require any thought process. Now, not so much.”

Scientists have discovered a link between the number of friends a Facebook user has and the size of certain regions in their brain.

The discovery suggests that the use of social networking sites might actually change our brains. The specific brain regions in question play a role in memory, emotional responses and social interactions.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of 125 university students who were all active Facebook users. They then cross-checked the results against another group of 40 students.

They found a strong connection between the number of Facebook friends and the quantity of grey matter in the amygdala, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where mental processing happens.

The thickness levels of grey matter in the amygdala were also linked to the amount of real-world friends people had, but the size of the other three regions appeared to be connected only to the amount of online friends that people had.

The students, on average, had around 300 Facebook friends, with the most connected having up to 1,000.

Ryota Kanai of University College London (UCL) said: “The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time. This will help us answer the question of whether the internet is changing our brains.”

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Debt collectors have been told not to use social media to pursue people.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) issued a reminder to businesses last week that using social media to recover consumer credit debts counts as unfair practice.

The warning also applies to banks, law firms and tracing agents as well as traditional debt collectors.

The OFT says that organisations who contact people via social media channels to chase them for money may expose their financial problems on public forums – something that would exacerbate any sense of stress, worry or embarrassment already being felt by the person in debt.

David Fisher, director of consumer credit at the OFT, said: “In the present economic climate, many people, including those who may be particularly vulnerable, are in financial difficulties.

“It is therefore crucial they are treated fairly by companies recovering their debts.”

Social media outlets that some debt collectors are using unfairly include Facebook and Twitter.

Delroy Corinaldi, director of external affairs at the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, told one financial website: “This is a welcome move. Many debtors are understandably anxious to keep their debt problems private from friends and work colleagues – and the possibility of being contacted by a debt collector on Facebook or Twitter causes serious worry for many.”

On Wednesday I’ll be speaking to a group of marketing students at Napier University. They want to discuss how marketing is being done through social media.

In our training workshops we quote a misconception about social media. “A lot of people think it’s another channel for marketing. It isn’t”. And then we explain the importance of “a conversation” and a fundamental shift in the way you interact with customers and get your message across.

It strikes me that as soon as you think of social media as a form of marketing, you’re doing it wrong. Social media at its best is an attitude, an ethos, a way of life right through the core of the company – like the writing through a stick of rock, where you’re engaging with your customers on instinct.

Of course, you have aims and objectives. But good social media keeps these hidden. The consumer should never be able to see your intentions, your marketing fingerprints shouldn’t be visible.

Apple is a great example. They opened a new store at Braehead recently. Most companies would have promoted this heavily and discounted on price. They didn’t. I received an e-mail from Apple telling me the store was opening. The mainstream media covered this. On the day Apple employees at the store held a ceilidh in full view of everyone before the doors opened.

What did they do on social media?

Nothing.

What did the crowds who turned up do on social media?

Everything. They wrote blogs, tweeted, shared pictures and video and discussed the whole experience.

It strikes me that most businesses’ marketing objectives for the opening of a new store would look like this…

i) Get the person to come to the store

ii) Get them to buy something

I reckon Apple’s objective would have been something like this…

i) Get the person to tell someone else about the store opening

Who’s doing the better job of marketing?

Even if the traditional company achieves big footfall and shifts products..at what cost has this been achieved? There’s the costs of the campaign leading up to launch, then the cost of discounting.

The Apple approach doesn’t cost anything. It gets more people into the store and more people paying full price for the products.

The ceilidh and chanting the Apple employees took part in before the opening of their Braehead store wasn’t the intense “team bonding” session I originally through it was. Instead, it’s extremely subtle marketing. It’s not about what they’re doing..it’s carefully designed to make me, as a consumer do something for them. In this case, the blog I wrote and the video I shot of all the staff coming out to meet the customers.

It’s me telling other people about the store opening via social media and I was convinced I was doing this because I wanted to.

Now I realise Apple made me want to.

And I’ve got another piece of insight because of my role as Gadget Guru on STV’s “The Hour”. We’d contacted Apple’s PR team several times over the years asking for product demos we could use on the show – iPods, iPhones, iPads etc. They never played ball. I thought maybe our show wasn’t big enough for them but it turns out they hardly ever let anyone preview their products. I thought they’d forgotten all about us but just before the Apple store opened at Braehead I received an e-mail from their PR team.

Would the STV cameras like to attend the opening of the new store “and speak to the crowds who’ve turned out about why they’ve queued through the night and how excited they are”?

Doesn’t that speak volumes about this company’s approach?! Anyone else would have promised behind the scenes access, an interview with the management, maybe even an exclusive free gift. Not Apple. All they’ll do is let the media speak to some of their biggest fans! And although STV stayed away on the day, several other outlets did turn up and that’s exactly the coverage they got.

Fascinating.

No other business is like Apple. But we can learn from them. And this demonstrates that if a business has got things right at its core, then they’ll have success on social media without typing a single word.

Significantly more than half of employers in the UK actively encourage the use of social media for work-related activities such as internet marketing.

According to legal firm DLA Piper, a total of 65% of employers do this, whilst more than three-quarters of employers say that they have a social media presence. Altogether, 86% are on Facebook, 78% are on LinkedIn and 62% are on Twitter.

The findings appear in DLA Piper’s new report Knowing your tweet from your trend: keeping pace with social media in the workplace. The report investigates the problems that employers face in staying abreast of social media and suggests procedures that could be put in place to minimise the risk posed by employees using social media at work.

According to the report, only 25% of respondents have a standalone, dedicated social media policy. Less than half (43%) have a social media policy as part of another policy, for example as part of their HR rules and regulations.

Kate Hodgkiss, a partner in DLA Piper’s employment practice and author of the report, said:

“There is widespread recognition that social media is not just a tool for marketing, but something that needs to be considered by all aspects of a business; from HR, to risk, to the upper echelons of corporate management. Our respondents recognise the benefits of social media to get their messages out to a wide audience, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods and far more quickly.”

Chelsea FC are better than any other English Premier League football club at interacting with their fans via social media and the internet.

That’s according to technology consultancy Lewis Communications, who have just published a new study into the way that football clubs connect with their fans online.

The study took into account factors including the number of Twitter and Facebook followers that each club had, the level of interaction each club had with its fans, the ease with which fans could access them online and how many apps they had.

The research found that some clubs were failing to engage with their fans – despite having millions of followers.

Manchester United, which came eighth, had the highest number of Facebook fans out of all the clubs – 19 million in total – but did little to engage with followers on the site.

Chelsea FC also beat the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs. Blackburn, Bolton and Swansea took the bottom three places in the table.

Out of the 20 teams in the table, only Bolton does not have an official Facebook presence. Meanwhile, Aston Villa and West Brom are the only sides with an official LinkedIn page.

Alex Clough, digital strategist at Lewis Communications, said: “Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed a new generation of fans to connect with their football idols and teams in ways that they haven’t been able to within the modern game and clubs need to embrace this.”

Chief marketing officers are struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing volume of customer data on social media sites, according to a new survey.

From Stretched to Strengthened, a report released by professional services and technology firm IBM, has found that only 26% of chief marketing officers (CMO) track blogs and that just 40% of them track any online communications at all.

The survey quizzed 1,734 CMOs around the world to find out more about the future of marketing – with questions on social media being central to the survey.
It found that whilst a few select big-name consumer brands are using high-profile social media campaigns, marketing teams in other businesses are yet to follow suit.

The likes of Coca-Cola and Starbucks are using social media to find out what their customers want and how they want to be communicated with.

However, other CMOs are unsure how to approach the massive numbers of social media users to their best advantage.

One CMO quoted in the survey commented: “The perfect solution is to serve each consumer individually. The problem? There are seven billion of them.”
However, CMOs are determined to push forward with social media despite any current trepidation.

Just over 80% of those surveyed said that they planned to up their use of social media within the next three to five years. They might wish to come to NS design for help.

Google+ may not be the big hit that it appeared to be when it launched.

The social networking site has lost 60% of its active users since 20 September, the date on which it was fully opened up to the public.

The news may well come as a surprise to those outside Google, especially as initial signs pointed to the kind of success that Google is used to. On 20 September, traffic to the site increased by a massive 1200% over that one day.

Web analytics organisation Chitika has released a report that attempts to explain the huge drop in user numbers.

It states: “The supply of users for social media is limited. To survive you must stand out and provide a service that others do not.”

Critics of the service have said that Google+ does not provide enough differentiation from its main rival Facebook in order to encourage users to migrate to it from Mark Zuckerberg’s site.

What’s more, Facebook users know that they will be able to connect to practically all of their family and friends thanks to its huge user numbers – 800 million at the last count.

By way of advice to Google+, the Chitika report states: “’Perhaps if Google can accelerate their current pace of innovation on their social network offering, Google+ could becoming a competitive alternative to its arch-rival, Facebook.

“Otherwise, given Facebook’s clout and reputation of rapid innovation, Google+ might just be left in the dust.”