Just to keep you in the loop, here are some of the top stories in the social media and online marketing world from the past week:

Facebook announces changes to Pages

Come August 23rd, Facebook’s long-talked about about changes to Pages will take effect. Any custom boxes on your Facebook Page (business pages, not personal profile) will disappear unless you move the content into a custom tab, which are becoming narrower.

It’s still a little unclear to me exactly what will be left in the left sidebar of your Page when boxes are gone, and how, if at all, you’ll be able to add custom info to the main page. I’m sure Facebook’s ‘wisdom’ will be revealed in time.

Hootsuite goes freemium
Hootsuite pulled the rug from under many of its users this week when it announced its set of paid plans. Yes, they still have a free plan but it’s very limited. Paid plans run from $5/month all the way up to the rather comical $1499/month (stop laughing, they’re actually being serious!) for their Enterprise edition.

Rapportive for Gmail
If you use Gmail, Rapportive is a very cool new add-on which displays information about all your contacts, culled from their social networks, right inside your inbox. Stalker-ish? Possibly, but still very cool and useful to further connect with people on various social networks.

“Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. And you can record thoughts for later by leaving notes.Imagine relationship management built into your email. For free.”

Twitter creates their own official tweet button
This isn’t all too revolutionary considering that there are currently a plethora of ways to add a “tweet this” style button to your website, but Twitter has decided to come out with their own.  There are already lots of WordPress plugins that support it.

Header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/myklroventine/2537309848/

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