With Thanksgiving less than a week away – and one week until Black Friday – brands, local businesses and non-profits can use their Facebook pages to get shoppers ready for the holiday season, promote Thanksgiving dinners, recipes and ideas, and even help feed their communities.

Brands

With the economy still struggling, many national brands, retailers and online sellers have decided to start their holiday pushes this year even before Black Friday. A few pages have launched promotions already, but they are tied more tied into the holidays and not specifically Thanksgiving.

Sears ran a promotion on their page until yesterday for Fans to be eligible to receive “VIP” notifications and offers via SMS for Black Friday, and Best Buy (which with over 150,000 new fans in the last week is only about 1,200 fans from a million) has two tabs devoted to holiday shopping already, but nothing that seems specifically about Thanksgiving.

Wal-mart also has two tabs for the holidays, one called “Holiday” for social shopping, and one labeled “Giving” that is aimed at supporting US troops and highlighting how Wal-mart gives back to the community, including feeding the hungry. The Food Network’s Page has a really nice tab dedicated to Thanksgiving that breaks down the parts of the feast and then links you off to The Food Network’s website for recipes.

Local Businesses and Non-Profits

Unlike many of the large brands, local businesses and non-profits are generally not lumping Thanksgiving into “the holidays” and are actually focusing on it as its own event. It’s no surprise that restaurants are especially keen on promoting their Thanksgiving dinners, as the Baker’s Drive-Thru in Southern California is doing with a sweepstakes to win one of 72 dinners, the Four Points Sheraton Ann Arbor has a dedicated Thanksgiving tab for their dinner, and the Big Fish Grill in Delaware and Moody’s Diner in Maine being other good examples of using Pages to rally local fans to dinner (if you’re near Waldoboro, Maine, Moody’s dinner is only $14.95 – take that, economy!).

Other interesting promotions that we found included a bank in Kentucky giving away a FlipCam, the band Underoath (which has 115,547 fans) giving away a $5 coupon off their t-shirts — this has generated 176 Likes and 40 comments, and a ski resort giving away passes to its opening weekend (the weekend after Thanksgiving) to new Fans.

Finally, a number of local non-profits and individuals are using Pages to help feed the hungry this Thanksgiving.

The Salvation Army San Diego will serve 2,000 Thanksgiving dinners, an individual is trying to feed 500 families, and a surfing shop is trying to gain support to feed kids.

Thanksgiving Page Trimmings

As we’ve seen, local seems to win out when it comes to Thanksgiving. Perhaps larger brands don’t see the value in separating Thanksgiving out of the rest of the holidays, and there is probably some wisdom in that. For local restaurants especially, if you are planning on serving dinner next Thursday, we highly suggest at the very least to do a Wall post about what you’re doing, and if you have a little more time, put up a dedicated Thanksgiving tab – even if you just list the event and menu, it may just be enough to entice people out of their living room for the afternoon.

Finally, if you just want to become a fan of Thanksgiving, here’s the unofficial Page.

Zynga has hit a new milestone on Facebook, and meanwhile, it has just launched a couple ways to increase its presence on the web: A stand-alone site for its hit game FarmVille and a new browser toolbar for Mafia Wars.

The San Francisco company now has more than 200 million total monthly active users on the site, according to AppData. This measure is slightly deceptive, as we don’t have a way to tell how many of users play more than one Zynga game — some large minority of these users are being counted more than once, especially as Zynga cross-promotes its games.

However, Zynga also currently has around 65 million daily active users, from our understanding. 61.3 million of those are on Facebook, according to AppData, so presumably the others are on its MySpace and iPhone applications.

If Facebook is clearly where Zynga is seeing the most usage, why would it launch a site and a toolbar for its games?

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games

Here’s a neat new feature we noticed on our Facebook Page this morning: the ability to target updates to users in specific locations or users who access the site in a specific language.

You can imagine this being useful for situations in which you’re promoting an event, or, posting content in multiple languages. By targeting only those that an item is applicable to, you reduce your chances of overwhelming your fans with unnecessary information to the point that they start hiding your updates.



To use it, there’s now a pull-down next to the “Share� button with the option of “Everyone� or “Customize.� Everyone lets you post a message to all of your fans as normal, but Customize lets you enter in a location (all the way down to the city level) and/or a language to post only to those that the settings apply to.

At the moment, it doesn’t appear you can create more than one custom group, so you’ll have to edit it each time you want to try a different location or language. You can however target multiple locations and languages simultaneously.

How might you use the new targeting capabilities? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: facebook

As we’ve seen in other parts of the world, Facebook continues to grow by more monthly active users every month in Latin America. This past month, it grew by 3.9 million users to reach 39.3 million monthly actives in the region, according to our Global Monitor report. This is up from the approximately 2 million it gained in September.

Argentina and Mexico continue to lead the growth charts, gaining 637,000 and 772,000 new users, respectively. Argentina also passed Colombia to become the largest in the region, with more than 7 million monthly active users. However, Mexico has a larger overall population and a lower Facebook penetration rate, so we expect it to pass Argentina at some point.

That’s among Spanish-speaking countries. Brazil is the largest country in the region, has the lowest penetration rate, and also gained 558,000 last month to be the third fastest growing country. If this pace continues, which it is on track to do, the Portuguese-speaking country will eventually be home to the most Facebook users on the continent.

In the month or so since Twitter started rolling out its Twitter Lists feature, a number of web and Adobe AIR based clients have added support for it.

However, we haven’t seen any native Twitter apps support Lists. Today Realmac Software released Socialite Beta 3 for Mac OS X, including, among other enhancements — basic list support. Realmac acquired Socialite (then named EventBox) back in October and expects to release the first version of the program by the end of the month.



Socialite is a multi-purpose social media client, and like Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck and Brizzly, it lets you track and update your Facebook and Twitter accounts. But Socialite goes a little further — adding support for Google Reader, Flickr, Digg and even RSS feeds.

The nice thing about Socialite is that it is a native Mac OS X app, which means it runs faster and has better performance and stability than some of the other multi-service clients. In Socialite 1.0, Beta 3, Realmac has fixed some bugs, changed how some of the authorization system works and added some new features.

The biggest new feature is support for reading Twitter Lists. Right now you only have the ability to watch lists that you’ve created because the Twitter API doesn’t let developers access all subscribed lists. If that changes in the future, Realmac will update List support accordingly. For version 1.0, Socialite won’t have the ability to add or edit your own lists, but that’s something the team is working on for future releases. Finally, although not in Beta 3, Retweet support (as Twitter officially supports it) is due in the final release of Socialite 1.0.

You can try out Socialite for free right now if you have Mac OS X 10.5 or Mac OS X 10.6. The program has come along way in just the last six or seven weeks and we look forward to seeing what else the app brings.

What do you think about the state of list and retweet support in different Twitter clients? Let us know!

ALSO: Be sure to check out Mashable’s Lists on Twitter!

Tags: realmac, Socialite, twitter, Twitter Lists

USocial, a company which sells Facebook friends and fans, has received a cease and desist from Facebook for violating the company’s terms of service. The BBC claims that the issue at hand is that the company is “letting people profit from their profile”, which is strictly forbidden within Facebook’s terms. We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on the issue, to see if there were any issues with the company selling fans. In early October we highlighted the growth in the pay per fan business model, and since then we’ve heard an increasing amount of buzz about the space.



More specific to the Cease and Desist sent to USocial were claims that the marketing firm “violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.” In other words, USocial’s activity is not kosher. The real question though is whether or not Facebook allows the selling of fans and/or friends as long as user accounts aren’t being harvested or accessed through unauthorized means.

While Facebook has explicitly stated that users cannot profit from their own profiles, it hasn’t been stated if third parties can sell friends or fans without providing monetary incentives to users. There is a rapidly increasing number of companies who sell fans to brands for Facebook Pages and it’s a topic which Facebook has yet to publicly comment on. Instead, “pay per fan” businesses continue to operate under the radar without explicit approval from Facebook.

Based on the BBC article, we’d assume that USocial simply crossed the line and paid users for adding friends and/or accessed user accounts through unauthorized means to generate new connections. We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment on the issue and will be sure to update this post if we hear back.

Brizzly is a web-based Twitter and Facebook client that has been gaining some momentum and buzz over the past couple months.

It has some slick features like being able to view photos and videos in-line in your Twitter stream, threaded DMs, and built-in photo uploading. It also recently added support for Twitter Lists. However, it’s remained in invite-only mode. That changes today though, as Brizzly is flipping the switch and allowing anyone to sign up for an account.



The company tells us that they’ll “still be in beta for a bit, which just means we’ll be continuing to experiment as usual.� One of those experiments, which launches today, is on-the-fly translation of tweets, which in theory lets you follow people who tweet in different languages and have them translated into your language of choice in your stream.

Brizzly is trying to compete in a very crowded space, but have an exceptionally strong team including Jason Shellen, who worked at Blogger with Evan Williams, and Chris Wetherell, who’s credited with having created Google Reader. Today, the company also announced they’ve added another ex-Googler to the mix, Ben Darnell, who was most recently working for Facebook via the social network’s acquisition of FriendFeed.

If you’re not yet familiar with the product, this video gives a brief overview:

Let us know what you think of Brizzly in the comments.

Tags: brizzly, facebook, social media, twitter

On any given day we receive 5 to 50 stories to post on AllFacebook, however there’s no way for us to currently cover everything that goes on. Determining which stories to publish is part art and part science, however that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of all the things going on related to Facebook. That’s why we’ve decided to post occasional updates on the stories that we couldn’t get to the day before. Today we have 3 stories from yesterday that you should be aware of.

Initial Class Action Complaint Filed Against Facebook and Zynga

Last week we wrote about an impending class action suit which named a number of companies on the social web including Facebook, Zynga, and a number of offer networks. At the time we reached out to the law firm responsible for the class action to find out more details. They told us that they were currently seeking individuals who had been deceived in order to name them in the suit. One week later it appears as though they’ve found that individual: Rebecca Swift.

On behalf of Swift and other victims, Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP has filed an initial class action complaint against Zynga and Facebook. No other networks appear to be named in this initial complaint, however there could be additional complaints filed in the near future. The turnaround time on this has been extremely quick. You can view the full complaint via Valleywag.

Facebook’s Common Stock Valuation Jumps

In what appears to be an effective press release for SecondMarket, Bloomberg published an article stating that Facebook’s valuation has jumped in private markets over the past few months. While many of us love to speculate about the future of Facebook and what their valuation will be, private markets are also extremely tricky for setting exact valuations. Then again, if someone is willing to pay a specific price, that price determines the value of the company at the time of the transaction.

In illiquid markets however it’s difficult to track bid and ask rates on shares since the information is not complete.

Adknowledge Acquires SocialMedia’s Ad Network

SocialMedia which was previously one of the leading Facebook platform ad networks, sold their ad network to Adknowledge for an undisclosed amount. This is part of a continued roll-up of ad networks which the company began back in 2008. The company currently own Cubics, Adonomics, Lookery’s ad network, SuperRewards, and now SocialMedia’s ad network. Adknowledge has been focused on the performance advertising space, an area which has come under increasing scrutiny amidst new class actions like the one we covered earlier in this post.

Adknowledge has been aggressive in building a large social advertising roll-up, this acquisition being the latest in an ongoing series of acquisitions.

More movie companies are using Facebook to reward fans and followers of their films by offering everything from early trailers to choosing where a movie is released.  Disney is the latest to cater to the Facebook crowd, giving fans of its upcoming “Alice in Wonderland” remake a first look at artwork from movie posters.

The page for the Tim Burton adaptation of the classic story currently has close to 70,000 fans. Disney has been launching individual pages for characters, too, and the one for Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter character collected the most fans of the three (no surprise there), with around the same number as the movie page. Disney then released images from movie posters on that page.

Movie fan pages are proving to be a valuable tool for film companies, but administrators have to know how to use pages in order to make them beneficial. The “Where The Wild things Are” fan page recently peaked at nearly 2 million fans, giving the studio a massive audience. Unfortunately, updates became less consistent, and fans are now defecting from the page. The administrators of the page missed out on any number of opportunities to cross promote other movies, projects, sponsors or any number of angles by failing to engage fans of the page or capitalizing on a huge following that they really didn’t have to work very hard to gain.

One success story in creating a more dynamic page is the efforts of the studio behind “Paranormal Activity.” The ultra-low budget film utilized social networking to help find viewers before ever even committing to theaters, thus ensuring the money would be waiting when the movie actually hit screens.

Disney isn’t updating the Alice-related pages very often, but they’re at least continuing to keep fans engaged. They’re offering up just enough content to keep the pages growing, and we’ll watch to see whether or not they increase their updates as the 2010 release draws closer.

We’ve been covering Facebook’s gradual rollout of the Facebook Ads APIs in recent weeks. Now, we’re beginning to see the first tools built on top of the APIs come to market. This week, two London-headquartered agencies, 77Agency and Techlightenment, are showing off what’s coming soon.

77Ageny’s new Facebook Ads tool lets advertisers manage multiple accounts, track conversions, run custom reports, bulk upload multiple campaigns and ad groups, and manage bids in real time. The agency says it is planning to license its tool to its finance, fashion, entertainment, telecom, publishing customers over the next few months.

“Our vision is that Facebook is going to be an alternative to Google AdWords. Facebook Ads is going to be a big direct response opportunity,” Marco Corsaro, Managing Director of 77Agency, told us from Rome this morning. “We have received a significant amount of queries from our clients who are already using Facebook Ads, and are interested in exploring our technology to do that in a better way.”

London-based social media agency Techlightenment tells us that its new social ads management tool, called Alchemy, will be launching in “full beta” in the next couple of weeks.

Techlightenment director Ankur Shah says that their service features better budget control, dynamic copy creation, auto-optimization for CPM, CPC and CPA, and day-parting.

Both companies have been working directly with Facebook as part of the initial testing of the Facebook Ads APIs, an expansion to Facebook’s performance advertising platform that we think should have been launched a lot sooner. Managing sophisticated Facebook Ads campaigns has been a major headache for agencies to date, so giving them more automated ways of managing and optimizing spend is good for the entire ecosystem. We expect to see many more advertiser tools coming soon.

To dive deeper on Facebook marketing tools and best practices, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook.