While most of us find one of our favorite pictures and put it in, others go to great lengths to have a unique, attention-grabbing cover photo. Some of the things people have done with their cover photos are simply amazing. Some play mind-tricks on you, some are silly and whimsical, and some are pretty funny.

As you start thinking about getting started with Timeline (if you haven’t already), take a look at some of our favorite cover photo “genres”.

If you have or have seen a Timeline cover photo you think is worth mentioning, let us know in the comments!

But have no fear, Halloween fanatics! Social media has embraced the fun and festive holiday as it has so many things, from fashion to sports. We can stop trying to get our friends to care more about Halloween and take to social media to find each other! Here are some ways social media has celebrated Halloween:

• Social media and tech themed Jack-o-lanterns – In the past few years, traditional Jack-o-lanterns have gone out of style. People get more creative with their carving, and some awesome social media-themed pumpkins are the result. Some popular ideas have been the Android logo, the Twitter Fail Whale, and Angry Birds. This year, Mashable is even having a contest for the best social media/tech Jack-o-lantern! The prize is a bunch of Mashable swag, making me wish I had better carving skills.
• “Liking” Halloween costumes on Facebook – For the first year, costume websites such as HalloweenCostumes.com are encouraging customers to “like” costumes on their sites. Doing so can shout to all your Facebook friends “I found this costume first, so no one copy me!” Clicking “Like” for lots of costumes can give your Facebook friends ideas for their own costumes, too. Personally, I wouldn’t share a picture of my costume with anyone before the big night!
• Trending costumes - People are also dressing up as popular social media icons, as well as actual social media platforms! It’s pretty popular to cut a square into a big piece of cardboard and go as your Facebook profile. People also dress up as popular memes and personalities. You can go as “duh-winning” by dressing up as Charlie Sheen, or as a Rickroll. Take a look at these 15 costume ideas inspired by memes and social media.
• Chat with author of Goosebumps - R.L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps series, will be hosting a 2-hour live chat on Scholastic’s Facebook and Twitter accounts on Friday, October 28. He will be offering followers jokes, trivia, and Halloween ideas, as well as answering questions asked by followers.

Facebook is obviously the most popular social network, ahead of Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and everything else. But besides being the largest social network, it is also the network on which customers interact with brands the most. Your brand probably already has a Facebook page, but do you use it in the right ways?

Here are 3 suggestions for interacting with your customers on Facebook.

1. Ask questions. – Whether you use the “Ask a question” polling feature or a regular status update, it is important to learn as much as possible about your customers. You can ask questions about everyday life to learn more about the behaviors of your customers, or get more specific. Ask people to share their experiences using your product. Whether reviews are good or bad, you can use them.
2. Reward your fans. – Contests and promotions are excellent ways to spark interaction and get new fans or customers. Your Facebook fans need a reason to continue following your business, so make it worthwhile for them. Offer special deals that are exclusive to your Facebook fans or let them be the first to know about news, special events, or special offers. Contests that require fans to ‘Like’ your page and share it with friends are very popular. By sharing your page with their other friends, fans are getting a chance to win a prize as well as recommending your business to their friends. It’s a win-win.
3. Interact back. – This is the most important thing to keep in mind. It doesn’t matter how many people ‘Like’ your Facebook page if it hasn’t sparked meaningful, two-way interactions. When a customer reaches out to you in any way, it is absolutely necessary to respond. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Click here to ‘Like’ eZanga’s Facebook page!

Other posts in this series:

• 3 Ways to Interact on Twitter
• 3 Ways to Interact on YouTube
• 3 Ways to Interact on LinkedIn
• 3 Ways to Interact on Tumblr
• 3 Ways to Interact on Google+

The frictionless sharing combined with Facebook’s new partnership with Spotify means that every song a user listens to on Spotify is shown on their profile/Timeline. Every. single. song. So if you listen to music on Spotify all day long, you would be doing some serious sharing. Also, friends would see what your guilty pleasure music was, and how often you listened to it. Luckily, Spotify has released an update to its app that has a “Private Listening mode” that keeps what you’re listening to off of Facebook until you choose otherwise.

Other concerns about frictionless sharing has been brought to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In a joint letter, nine privacy groups including the ACLU have asked the FTC to look into Facebook’s practice of collecting data about users’ online activities while logged out of Facebook and automated sharing. In the letter, the groups said: “These changes in business practices give the company far greater ability to disclose the personal information of its users to its business partners than in the past. Options for users to preserve the privacy standards they have established have become confusing, impractical, and unfair.”

Do you want Facebook to automate sharing for you, or do you want to retain the ability to pick and choose what activity is posted?

But first, let’s talk about YOU. What changes are you going to see over the next couple weeks? The eZanga team has been looking through the new profile layout, which will be called your Timeline. Here’s a summary of the look, functionality and customization options:

TIMELINE: all of your stories, all of you apps, express who you are.

Just what it sounds like, Timeline will be chronicling the story of your life in an easy to use format. Facebook will automatically summarize and time stamp your past/present events including: photos, posts, tags, check-ins, groups, likes…well pretty much every click you ever made on Facebook, and then organize it in chronological order. The outlined blue box below enables you to jump to periods of time in your Facebook history.

‘Now’ is the majority of what is displayed on your Timeline (encompassing the past days and weeks), then breaks down to recent months, years, and decades. I know you’re probably thinking, “Decades…but Facebook hasn’t been around for decades?” Answer: Timeline allows you to go back in time (insert Back to the Future quote here) and fill in the moments of your life that occurred BEFORE Facebook time:

Yes, the When says “May 23, 2003″ the day and year eZanga.com was founded. I was even able to tag who I was with (eZanga co-founders Rich Kahn, CEO and wife Beth Kahn, CFO). Timeline allows you to add:

• Work and education: Add a job, school or military affiliation
• Family and Education: When you got engaged or married, add a child or pet, or when you lost a love one
• Living: When you moved, bought a house or vehicle, and add a roommate
• Health and Wellness: When you broke a bone, had surgery, or overcame an illness
• Milestones and Experiences: When you learned a language, got your license, traveled, earned an achievement or award

(Each of these categories give you the option to add a default life event if it is not available)

“Expressing who you are” was major during the f8 conference. The biggest point to Timeline is being able to define who you are in a socially interactive way. Your favorite music, foods, television shows, movies, games etc, can be integrated into your personal Timeline. How’s that?

OPEN GRAPH: A New Class of Apps

Say hello to Open Graph, one of the second biggest changes to Facebook. We won’t be talking too much about this in the post today but here’s the jist: The “Like” will turn into VERB+NOUN and every actions you can perform (read, listen, watch, cook, run, search etc.) will take it’s place. Say what?!

Ok, here’s an example: Let’s say you are listening to music on Spotify. The New Facebook will let you share, “Jimmy Hoppa is LISTENING to Jeremiah was a Bull Frog on Spotify.”

The next Facebook Era is all about “Engagement” and connecting users in almost any way that is virtually possible, without ever leaving the site. So not only can you listen, but you can listen with your friends on Facebook! Open Graph is going to be the next wave to Social Business, Social Personal, Social Everything.

As we learn about the applications created using Open Graph, and the different ways businesses will use and integrate them into Facebook, we will post more.

There’s the overview. So tell me, how do you feel about the New Facebook?

Activate your Facebook Timeline here.

Facebook has already made some pretty big changes to the social network recently: new friend lists, a real-time news ticker, and the Subscribe button. But apparently, all these new features will seem like nothing when Facebook announces what’s next at the conference.

In a Mashable article titled “Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed,” Ben Parr talks about how he’s seen what Facebook will be launching.  His thoughts? “It’s going to change the world of social media…The Facebook you know and (don’t) love will be forever transformed.”

Wow…is anyone else nervous? Most of us can’t imagine life without Facebook, and with many changes to Facebook in the past, that’s what using the new features feels like at first. One of the things that keeps users coming back, regardless of how unhappy they are with recent changes, is that it’s still Facebook. But with what is to come, will it still feel like Facebook?

If you want to keep up with the conference, you can watch it live here, beginning at 9:30 a.m. PST/12:30 p.m. EST. You can also stream through a mobile device on Livestream. Our mascot, Jimmy Hoppa, will also be on Facebook and Twitter discussing the conference…hop in and join him!

It’s understandable that people get upset over their privacy, especially with a site like Facebook, where people put up so much personal information.  But the newest Facebook feature, the Subscribe button, may actually put people at ease.

The Subscribe button is another feature that could possibly make Facebook more like other social networks like Twitter and Google Plus.  Twitter and G+ both allow you to follow someone without them following you.  Facebook friending, however, has always been reciprocal.  Two people friended each other, and they each saw the others’ posts.

But the reciprocal model has drawbacks.  You may want to see someone’s posts, but they don’t necessarily want to see yours.  Enter the Subscribe button.

The Subscribe button will allow Facebook users to subscribe to someone’s public posts without necessarily being friends with them.  This will be helpful for people in the public eye, such as celebrities and journalists, who obviously cannot “friend” everyone, especially with Facebook’s limit on the number of friends a user can have.

Before you start worrying that random and possibly dangerous people are going to subscribe to your feed, know that it is completely opt-in.  You must first allow subscribers through Facebook settings.  But don’t worry, you can subscribe to other people without allowing subscribers on your own page.  And once you’ve allowed subscribers, they only see the posts you’ve made public.

The Subscribe button also allows you to fine-tune your News Feed.  If you are friends with someone, you are subscribed to their updates, and can control how much of your friends’ updates you see.  You can choose to see all updates, most updates, or “Only Important” updates (don’t ask me how they determine what is important in other peoples’ lives).  You can also specify what kind of updates to receive, such as status updates, life events, photos and video, and games.

The ability to fine-tune your News Feed is what I like most about the Subscribe button.  Paired with the new friends lists, Facebook users can have different types of friendships, just as you do in real life.

Will you use the Subscribe button, either to control your News Feed or to find new people?

Smart Lists, Facebook’s new content sharing News Feed roll out, will automatically categorize your friends into 3 standard groups: People you work with, People you went to school with, and People within 50 miles of your city. Smart Lists will go along with their existing Friends Lists grouping feature…Oh really, you don’t know what that is? Not surprised since practically no one even uses it (less than 5% of all Facebook users).

This new Lists feature will have two ways for you to share/control content:

1. Status Updates: When you are about to post an update, you can control who will (or not) be able to see your status. Next to the ‘Post’ button, there is a drop down box that allows you to specify your intended audience.

2. News Feed: Once you create your designated list, you can narrow your feed updates to that group(s?) of people.

Facebook’s guide to the new feature states,“Feed filters make it easy to see a selected set of friend’s updates in one place and share exclusive with them.”

Hmm…looks kind of like Google + Circles doesn’t it? Well…because it is. Let’s be serious, it’s Facebook. It’s their job to take someone’s idea and make it even better.  But will this auto-grouping feature be a Facebook win…or fail?

Here at the eZanga office, most of the employees were on their lunch break in the diner or break room watching television, at first tremors seeming very minor and almost unnoticeable. As loose objects began rattling and shaking to a somewhat unnerving beat, some employees ran outside noticing that most of the other buildings in the Middletown professional center had evacuated as well (Ok, ok..we know, it really wasn’t that bad…but better safe than sorry?). Collectively we stammered to call/text loved ones; however, most of the networks were busy.

Immediately everyone up and down the east coast simultaneously turned to social media. “Customers in East may experience intermittent delay making/receiving calls after recent earthquake. This is a temporary mass calling event,” Sprint told their Twitter network. Followed by Verizon’s tweet, “There was some network congestion in the East after tremors. Continuing to monitor.” Facebook feeds flooded with accounts of the quake..and oh yea, don’t forget to check in to Earthquakepocalypse on Foursquare–you can earn a badge!

When all is said and done, it’s reassuring to know there is at least one form of communication the masses can turn to in case of emergency–thanks Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Next week, Social Media and Hurricane Irene. Stay tuned.

The app already has more than 600 customer reviews and 900 ratings, receiving 3.5 out of five stars.

The app allows you to message both Facebook friends and contacts in your phone in an SMS type format.  It links your messages in Facebook with texts, chats and emails on your mobile phone.  You need to login with your Facebook account for access, but you can send messages to those who are not on the worldwide social network.  It has location and photo sharing features, and it also has group messaging capability—just like a BBM group.

As competition, this was an ideal time for Facebook Messenger to be released, considering how BBM was much involved in the London riots—for better or for worse—and showing how popular these group instant message apps are becoming.

The only complaint is that Facebook now has two apps, so most likely the messenger will be integrated into the regular app in the future.

Facebook has over 750 million users worldwide, so this app should have no problem taking off.  Hey, it’s already number one on the free app chart!