However, that doesn’t mean that you should focus solely on just the one site. It’s important to broaden your range as you can practically generate leads from anywhere and have at least two or three different sites to help you reach as large an audience as possible.

Unbounce and Bop Design have created a new infographic that shows the strengths of both social media sites. Facebook is the most popular site, but Linkedin is more focused on professional content.

Each site has its own benefits, but one useful piece of information to take away from this is that 41 per cent of B2B companies that use Facebook for marketing has acquired a customer through this channel. While not as high as LinkedIn, it should be enough to make B2B marketers realise that there are benefits to having a presence on Facebook and other sites too.

Now the service has gotten a redesign which makes navigation easier and gives it the look and feel of a magazine app. The first thing you will notice is that the display is a lot more visual. Virtually every news piece on display has an image to accompany it which makes the magazine much easier on the eye. The further you scroll down, the more news items will load up so you’re able to look up at least 50+ articles at any given time.

Also, if you want a more traditional layout, you can customise it so that all news pieces are presented as a list. Each piece is accompanied by a ‘share’ and ‘save’ function, the latter is the handier function as you can quickly gloss through the different articles and bookmark them for reading later.

More importantly, the customisation features available have been tweaked to allow greater input as to what content you want to appear. Following the same principles as the main page, each category is represented by an image and its follower count. Alongside the option of following over 340 different media outlets, you’re also given the choice of following specific topics and industries so that you can keep up with all the latest news in those sectors.

On the LinkedIn blog, Joann Wu writes: “One of the key design principles that drove the approach for the visual change was to simplify the experience; creating an elegant, delightful and customized experience for news consumption.” The style wouldn’t look out of place if it was an iPad app (the mobile apps have gotten a redesign as well with LinkedIn Today given prominence) as the magazine style is reminiscent of the numerous iPad magazine apps out there.

I don’t think this is the start of a bigger decline for Apple but it is interesting to see how many of the Apple fan boys are now quiet despite writing stories about the stock while it was on the up and breaking milestone and record after record. For what it is worth we are fast approaching a great buying opportunity and if the markets continue to trend downwards getting in around the $500 mark in the next couple of months would be good business in the long run given the products coming down the track (iPhone 5 and Apple TV) and the strong numbers Apple continue to post. What do you think? Are we getting back towards a fair valuation or is there plenty of upside left in Apple yet?

In my previous career role, I worked for Mason Technology. Mason's supplied high-end laboratory instrumentation to all of the main Pharma and Healthcare companies. So I have an insight into how tightly regulated these sectors are. This tight regulation places a lot of restrictions on using Digital Channels, particularly Social Media platforms, to promote products or even create brand awareness.

In this webinar, I want to focus on real and tangible ways that Pharma and Healthcare companies can use E-Commerce, SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Analytics and other digital channels to promote/sell their products. These Digital channels, if used correctly, could really assist current Sales and Marketing teams in their daily roles of developing new and maintaining existing business relationships.

From a company level, we will also look at how Digital strategies should involve all areas of the business and investigate any angles to potentially use Social Media platforms in a non-risky way to promote the brand.

The webinar will start at 12 noon on Friday 18th May. All are welcome. If you cannot attend the live webinar, there will be a recorded edition available which I will email to all registered participants.

Register for the webinar

Numerous other tech and web companies have launched IPOs in the past so with that in mind, here’s a brief summary of the bigger IPOs in recent history. While the conditions and atmosphere surrounding these IPO is different in comparison to Facebook, it could provide some hints as to how Facebook’s stock – expected to trade under the stock ticker FB – will perform.

Google

Founded: 1998
IPO Date: May 2004
Ticker Symbol: GOOG

Pretty much everyone knows the deal with Google and the buildup to its IPO eight years ago was remarkably similar to Facebook’s. Both are hot properties in the tech world, both were heavily anticipated (relative to their time) and both have changed how people use and view the web.

Google ended up experiencing its greatest revenue growth rate prior to the IPO, something that hasn’t been proven just yet with Facebook’s new advertising structure. The stock was priced at $85, opened at $100 and closed at $100.34 on the day of its IPO. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a valuation of more than $23 billion By the end of the year, Google closed at $194 giving those who invested during the IPO a healthy increase in funds.

How It’s Faring Now

For a stock that’s been trading for over eight years, Google’s has been going from strength to strength and is now trading at $628. The highest it ever traded at was $714 in December 2007 before it experienced a massive dip during 2008 ($310 was the low point) but the company has recovered spectacularly and continues to rise.

LinkedIn

Founded: March 2003
IPO Date May 2011
Ticker Symbol: LNKD

With over 90 million members in over 200 different countries, LinkedIn has a dedicated professional network and therefore has a loyal and regular user base. Having a net profit of $15.4 million at the end of 2010, the professional social networking site, opened at $45 and ended the day trading at $94.25, a 109 per cent increase. By the end of the day, LinkedIn was worth $8.9 billion. Not bad for a company that was valued at $3 billion and had priced shares between $32 and $35 a piece less than a month.

How It’s Faring Now

After a drop to $65 at the end of 2011 and a steady rise after that, the company is trading at a healthy $113. Its performance is pretty healthy, despite a scare in April, and it look set to maintain its current share price. The rise after April could be a result of LinkedIn announcing an increase in revenue for the first quarter of 2012.

Groupon

Founded: Nov 2008
IPO Date Nov 2011
Ticker Symbol: GRPN

After turning down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, the daily coupon website was experiencing quarterly growth of 111 per cent at the end of 2010. This then plummeted down to 10 per cent by Q3 in 2011 and a number of problems involving corporate decisions and their CEO Andrew Mason who eccentric image had people worried that he would be ripped apart during the company’s roadshow.

Groupon raised $700 million after it set its strike price at $20 when it first started trading in November 2011. This gave the company a value of $12.7 billion and made it the largest technology company to go public since Google.

However, the company is struggling to rebuild investor confidence after dropping 51 per cent since its IPO and is now valued at just over $6 billion. It’s hoped that the company’s Q1 earnings report will show an 80 per cent jump in sales to $530.8 million and show that profitability is improving so that investor confidence is restored.

How It’s Faring Now

After a promising start, shares for the company has fallen down to $13 with the price steadily dropping after February after experiencing peaks and troughs before that. Groupon’s current performance is impacting its share price and it looks unlikely this will change in the short-term.

Zynga

Founded: July 2007
IPO Date: Dec 2011
Ticker Symbol: ZNGA

With deep ties to Facebook, the social gaming company has enjoyed huge success with its ‘-ville’ series and Words With Friends, Zynga jumped at the chance of floating on the stock market back in December and raised about $1 billion from the share sale.

However, while most companies experience an increase in share price on the first day of trading, Zynga’s shares, priced at $10, rose by 11 per cent initially before closing out the day at $9.45. However, the company is profitable in comparison to other IPO like Groupon who had great results in the first day of trading, but is now trading well below those prices.

How It’s Faring Now

The company is currently trading at $8 per share which, while by no means catastrophic considering its original trading price, isn’t encouraging since it’s been a steady drop since February.

Yahoo!

Founded: March 1995
IPO Date: April 1996
Stock Ticker: YHOO

Like the majority of tech IPO’s, Yahoo!’s venture started with a bank with an opening price of $24.50 before hitting a high of $43 and closing at $33. At the time, it was the brand associated with Yahoo! which was the major draw for investors, ensuring that the stock performed well and brought in $32.5 million from the IPO.

In recent years, Yahoo! has been underperforming and has lost a significant share of the search engine market. A number of high profile slip ups in recent times hasn’t helped its case either.

How It’s Faring Now

Yahoo!’s stock has been steady but the company’s allure and brand strength has been greatly diminished in recent times. The company is currently trading at $15 with no real sign of its fortunes changing.

eBay

Founded: Sep 1995
IPO Date: Sep 1998
Stock Ticker: EBAY

Before being acquired by Paypal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, eBay had a similar performance to Yahoo! in which it closed its first day of public trading with a 163 per cent increase in share price. Starting off at $18 a share, the company closed with its shares being valued at $47. Through the IPO, eBay raised $63 million with the market cap nearly hitting $1.9 billion.

How It’s Faring Now

Currently trading at $39 after a steady increase since the start of this year. eBay’s stock shows no signs of decreasing any time in the near future, unless a crash occurs.

So How Will Facebook Perform?

Firstly, it’s important to note that even if the IPO never went ahead, Facebook is performing well on its own. The company makes a significant net profit from advertising, which makes up 80 per cent of its revenue. The problems faced by companies like Groupon and LinkedIn was that there was no sustainable business plan in place.

Facebook’s advertising methods, their recently declared intent of improving the mobile experience (one that is badly needed) and 900 million users could be enough to convince regular investors and traders that this is a company worth investing in. Current market conditions could play a part in how well its stock performs, but it’s likely that the hype and goodwill that surrounds this IPO will be enough to cover for this.

Of course, future revenue will be dependent upon how well advertisers adapt to the company’s new advertising features and whether it will provide them with a significant return in the long-term. General Motors got a lot of attention when it announced that it will be pulling all advertising from Facebook, but so far it seems like an isolated case and so far, no other major company has voiced similar concerns.

With shares expected to trade at around $34 to $38, chances are Facebook will experience a first day with their share prices doubling at some point that day. However, while its short-term success on the stock market is all but guaranteed, Facebook needs to make sure its long-term strategy is rock solid to ensure that the next few years will be similar to Google instead of becoming a Groupon or Yahoo!. Current trends suggest that it will be the following, but Facebook will do well to remember that a lot can happen in a short space of time.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the funding is being led by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten Inc., with Pinterest’s existing venture-capital investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also participating. Pinterest chose Rakuten to lead the funding round because of the Japanese company’s global presence and how it can help the start-up both enhance its product and expand internationally, a person familiar with the matter told the WSJ.

The site lends itself well to e-commerce with eBay and Amazon integrating Pinterest tabs onto their site so users can pin specific products. Also, there’s the option to include price tags with individual pins if you include the pricing of a product, clearly signaling the direction that the site wants to go down.

However, like most start up sites Pinterest has no real business model. Earlier this year, the company has about 35 employees, was making little to no revenue and was unprofitable. How exactly the site plans to monetise the site and whether it even has a business plan is unclear.

However, Pinterest has joined a small number of up-and-coming companies who have reached or exceeded the $1 billion validation mark. Such tech companies include Evernote, Dropbox, Airbnb and Square. Pinterest recently became the third most popular social media site in the world and has over 20 million users according to comScore.

This is an interesting move as it seems to be part of a wider strategy by Facebook to launch individual apps for specific features on the site instead of trying to pack all their features and services into one main app. This new app allows you to log in as your actual page rather than trying to access it through your own personal app, which had caused major confusion for users in the past. This was especially true for those in the unfortunate position to be managing several Facebook pages.

Even simple activities like posting photos on the go from a mobile app was a tricky experience. It is great to see Facebook giving their most important customers a tool that will allow them to manage their pages more effectively and we can only imagine that there might be advertising products to come with this in the future. Here is your complete guide to the new app.

Use The App As Your Page Only

When you log in now, instead of having to flick between your personal profile, you can actually log in and use the app as if you were the business page only. This will increase interaction and allow you to have a better overview of your business page presence.

Filter Options

One of the biggest problems in the past has been logging in as a personal user, but you can now log in as the page itself and filter the options as you need them.

New Likes

If you want to find out who has liked your page and what their profiles look like then this option is now front and center, letting you see them in real-time as they come in.

Overview Of Insights

One of the big issues with the old experience was that it was very hard to see what sort of interaction your page was getting when viewing from a mobile device. This has been solved by this simple screen.

Advanced Analytics

Although the insights don’t drill down as much as they do on the desktop version of the site, they do offer you a much better look at your Facebook page and how it’s working for you.

Activity Actions

With the old app, it was impossible to see what was actually happening on your Facebook page, but you can now see every single interaction via a dedicated notification page.

A Great Move

This is a brilliant and unexpected move from Facebook. What has become clear is that there is only so much that they can pack into the main app and to see them thinking about their users like this is a great sign. What will be interesting to see is how many more apps Facebook will continue to roll out around their most important products like messenger and pages. There seems to be a clear strategy emerging here around mobile and for the most part it is very smart. Go have a play with it and see what you think. We love it!

The problem that Hellman’s faced was that while people were buying their mayo, it was only being used in the kitchen for one specific task: making sandwiches. What they wanted to do was raise awareness that their product could be used to cook in a number of ways and to produce complex recipes with a large number of ingredients.

When shoppers paid for their Hellman’s, it triggered software that scanned their entire shop, check a database and returned a recipe to their till receipt in real time. The genius part of this is that the shoppers had the ingredients in their bags already, it raised awareness about the versatility of their product and it actually increased sales by a huge 44 per cent in the first month alone. Not everything has to be the latest technology break through in marketing, sometimes you just have to look at the world around you and re-think things a little.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is changing its strategy for its Android mobile operating system, with plans to give different mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers. This is a significant change from their original strategy of joining up with only one hardware maker at a time to produce lead devices, before releasing the software to other device makers. These lead devices were then sold to consumers through wireless carriers or retailers.

The reasoning for this is to exert more control over key features and apps that run on Android-powered smartphones and tablets, reducing the influence of wireless carriers over such devices, sources told the WSJ. Wireless carriers usually handle marketing and sales of devices and can exert some control over the services that run on them.

The problem with Android is that the market is fragmented as developers struggle to make sure apps are compatible with numerous different Android-powered devices. Creating a more standardised platform and framework that all manufactures  can work from would go some way towards fixing this problem. Google has also started selling smartphone devices directly from Google Play in the U.S., so there’s potential for Google to start selling the majority of Android devices directly from its store. If Google gets that right, it could mean a whole new revenue stream for the company.

Larger iPhone Screen?

Apple, on the other hand, is reported, again by the Wall Street Journal, to have ordered screens from its Asian suppliers that are bigger than the ones used currently found on the iPhone. The screens are said to measure at least 4 inches, the first change to the iPhone’s screen which has always measured 3.5 inches.

The move could be seen as a reaction to Samsung’s latest device the Galaxy S III, which boasts a 4.8 inch display and will make it one of the largest smartphone devices when it’s released. Apple is working with multiple screen makers including LG Display, Sharp and Japan Display Inc., a new company created last month by three Japanese companies and the government.

While a larger screen would mean a better experience watching videos and browsing the web, it could mean that different size iPhones could be sold in the future, a 4 inch screen version and the original 3.5 inch screen which could be sold at a cheaper price. It’s been rumoured that the next generation iPhone will be released at the end of this year.