Brands respond to consumers via Twitter 61% of the time; in this social media space, brands can either @ message in public or send a private, personalized DM. Although, for some reason brands often times think it's alright to send spammy, non-personalized DMs when a consumer decides to follow them.

This study was done before Twitter launched brand pages as a part of the new-new Twitter.

The Mr Youth study also did not include the new-ish Google+ pages, which could eventually trump Facebook pages.

On Twitter, brands that follow their followers back can easily communicate through private DM messages. On Facebook, however, most of the conversation between brand and user takes place on the wall, something that not all customers may feel comfortable with.

The other positive aspect of private messages for brand pages is that every comment doesn't get swept into the Facebook news feed for all of a user's friends to see. For brands that are looking to promote positive notes from fans, however, a positive message sent privately doesn't help exposure.

Not all brands have to comply with private messages, however. Page owners will be given the option for private messages.

A visitor doesn't even have to "Like" a brand's page in order to send a private message. Every sent message ends up in the Messages inbox along with notes from Facebook friends. The page receives a notification once the message has been sent.

WeAreSocial.sg reports that this feature is only available in Asia, suggesting that this may be an East-to-West rollout like Facebook Timeline.

In this post we look at the early efforts of two leading luxury car brands: BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The comparison shows that Facebook has a clear first-mover advantage in user numbers and its comparatively advanced developer platform. But Facebook shouldn't get complacent, Google+ has a lot of promise as a destination site where brands can truly engage their fans.

Let's first look at BMW, because it clearly illustrates the advantages that Facebook Pages currently hold.

Facebook's Trump Cards

The most obvious difference is in the user bases. The official BMW Facebook page has 6.7 million fans at time of writing. The official Google+ page for BMW only has 339 followers at this time, because it just launched. That's a totally unfair comparison of course, but bear with me. I'll explain below how Google+ can quickly catch up in terms of user numbers for Pages.

The other big difference is that BMW's Facebook Page is very interactive, whereas the corresponding Google+ Page so far isn't. When you 'like' the BMW Facebook Page, you are prompted to customize your dream BMW via an application called MAKE IT YOURS. Below is a hot little red number I came up with.

But the developer platform is something that Google can quickly catch up with, too. The Google+ team is promising big things for its nascent API.

The 'E' Word: Engage

The big question is how can Google+ Pages get an edge and not merely catch up to Facebook Pages on user numbers and interactivity. Looking at BMW's Facebook Page Wall gives a clue. It's a complete mess, because BMW allows its millions of followers to post directly to the Wall - which encourages spam and other irrelevant content. It's the opposite of BMW's clean and focused Google+ Page, which users cannot post directly to.

But wait, you say, other brands do a better job of managing their Facebook Wall. That's true, Mercedes-Benz USA carefully maintains its its Facebook Page. Including a moderated Wall full of engaging content. Over 175,000 people have liked Mercedes-Benz USA on Facebook and there appear to be a lot of comments its Wall. But are there? On average it's around 20-25 comments per post, with a few getting up to 40-45. So at best that's less than 1/4 of a percent (0.25%) of its total Facebook fan base engaging with the brand. Which is precisely the opportunity for Google+ and its brand pages...

Google+ has already shown that it can engage its users around topics of interest to them; and foster discussions. Look at the activity among artists on Google+, for example.

There are millions of car fanatics in the world and many of them have their favorite brands. So where brands such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz may find the best use for Google+ is in engaging with their fans.

Also, because of Google's media products - such as YouTube and Google Reader - Google+ integrates well with other forms of media. This post on the Mercedes-Benz Google+ Page is a good example:

Let's not forget the Google+ Hangouts, which are group video chats. It's not hard to see the potential for Top Gear-like group discussions among car fans, using Hangouts. Of course as with any social media channel, the key for brands like BMW will be to post content that isn't just advertising. On launch day last week for Google+ Pages, The Muppets were lambasted for holding a pseudo Hangout that was really just an extended promotional video.

What About Those User Numbers...

While there aren't many comments so far on the Google+ Page for Mercedes-Benz, that will come once more of Google+'s reported tens of millions of users start following brands.

What's more, Google has the capacity to - ahem - drive more car fans to Google+. It can do this through its enormously popular services like YouTube and Google search. For example, adding a prominent 'related' link next to a YouTube video about luxury cars that points to (you guessed it) the Google+ Pages of BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Or adding contextual links to Google search results. Google can also, not incidentally, make a lot of money charging brands for those links.

Update: Google has already begun the integration with search via Direct Connect. This allows you to go straight to a Google+ brand page by searching for "+[name]" in Google Web search. This feature is in limited beta currently.

So, Facebook or Google+ Pages?

It's early days. At this stage, Facebook has a huge lead over Google+ in terms of user numbers for its brand Pages and advanced apps like BMW's MAKE IT YOURS. But as noted above, Google+ can quickly catch up in both regards.

Google+ also shows a lot of promise as a platform for two-way discussions around specific topics of interest, which plays right into the hands of brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

Let us know your thoughts about Facebook Pages vs. Google+ Pages. Do you think brands will eventually find the Google+ version to be more rewarding?

Why are People Commenting and Liking More Now Than Before?

When a user engages with content by commenting, liking or re-sharing, more people see the content. So if content is highly sharable and engaging, it will pop up in the news feed quickly, whereas un-engaging posts will not. Even if your content is highly sharable, most people will only see it once, says SearchEngineWatch. This is why the hybrid news feed sometimes shows "top news," but most of the time just shows "recent stories."

As an experiment this week, I've been starting off my mornings by sharing a piece of highly sharable content that I see popping up a lot in my news feed. Here's what surfaced today:

I check my Facebook multiple times a day, and I never did see that content in my news feed again even though a number of my Facebook friends had commented on it, liked it and shared it. This makes perfect sense, since you're a lot less likely to like, share or comment on a story that you've already seen.

The social networking site will give at least $50 to up to 200,000 small business in a partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.

Facebook already makes an estimated $4.05 billion in global advertising revenue.

Facebook will start the advertising push with a roadshow and a series of webinars that teach small business owners how to use the site and social media. Facebook has set up a page for more information.

Currently, brands and business are not be able to operate like a person when the Timeline feature rolls out on Thursday. But the site is making changes to how businesses represent themselves.

Contextual advertising on the site has been increasing in quality. It used to be spotty, but the amount of social sharing going on is making it easier for people to pinpoint how to deliver ads,improving conversion rates.

This trend may have moved Facebook to change how it allows consumers to interact with brands. Right before the launch, Facebook took away the "Like" requirement for brands. Fans no longer had to "Like" a brand page in order to comment on it. This news came in the wake of an infographic that showed over 40% of fans don't care about the page or interacting with the brand, if they are not given a reason to do so.

As social sharing becomes more prevalent, it's likely that display advertising will continue to be the most efficient source of revenue for the company.

The study by DDB reveals that two in five brand followers surveyed are not interested in engaging with Facebook pages after a marketing engagement ends.

When we signed up for a new account to test this feature, Facebook recommended Peter Frampton's and Barack Obama's Pages to us, as well as the Pages of Glenn Beck, Trisha Yearwood, Walmart, American Idol, Starbucks, Tide, Coca-Cola and about 100 more Facebook pages. The list we saw featured slightly more celebrities (ranging from Lady Gaga to Paula Deen) than brands, but it also included a number of media outlets, including CNN, the New York Times and Fox News.

It is not clear how Facebook organizes this list of suggested Pages, but it looks like the company presents new users with a random mix of some of the most often "liked" pages.

Being included in this list will surely give these Pages a major boost in subscribers. Unlike Twitter's old Suggested Users List, however, Facebook's list is not a random sampling of the accounts that Facebook's engineers like. Instead, the process looks to be more democratic. The list actually shows how many people "liked" a given Facebook Page and the list only highlights the most popular Pages on the site. The number of "likes" for the Pages that appeared when we signed up for a new account ranged between 50,000 to 2 million "likes."

Getting First-Time Users to Like Pages

Facebook is clearly trying to make the experience for its first-time users better with this new list. Obviously, the company is also trying to highlight Facebook Pages in the setup process. New Facebook users are probably signing up to connect with their family members and friends, but the new sign-up process also highlights the fact that Facebook can be a good source for news updates and allows users to connect to celebrities and brands.

If you would like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb team on Facebook, head over to our ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page.

"Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it." Unlike a Facebook page devoted to, or run by, a company, a Community Page might be devoted to an area or an activity that cannot be legitimately claimed by a limited group such as a corporation.

Li-i-i-nks! Li-i-i-nks!

The Connected Profiles certainly add to this proliferation of linking.

Fields in your profile, like city, education and employer, as well as your interests, will now be automatically linked to their respective pages.

"Instead of just boring text," said Li, "these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you."

Additionally, each time you login, Facebook will have a suggestion box filled to bursting with links for you.

Frankly, the proliferation of links that result from these features makes it sound like nothing so much as a content farm like Answers.com or Demand Media.

If you're publicity shy, you may need to avoid these Community Pages altogether.

"Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you're connected to."

The solution? Never connect to any page that indicates an interest you don't want the world to know about. If you find yourself connected already, disconnect as quickly as you can. Given the automatism of the profile links, it looks like you will be publicly linked and will have to de-link from each page you don't want, regardless of how clear you've been about your privacy.

This is not the first time this week that individuals have seen their social media-related identities hijacked for advertising purposes. Crunchgear recently reported a slew of tweets linking to phishing sites. Essentially a bot account has been pushing out fake retweets from celebrities in the hopes that loyal fans will see the RT@aplusk's and RT@oprah's and make the mistake of clicking through.

While on the one hand it's incredibly flattering that your endorsement of a product might actually influence others' beliefs and attitudes. It's probably best to monitor your identities to ensure that your good reputation remains in tact. And if you don't mind endorsing products in your profiles, you might as well get paid for it through a service like Magpie or Izea.

UPDATE: After publishing this article, we received a note from Facebook representative Annie Ta saying, "Basically, any ads you currently see doing this are coming from third-party ad networks and are only running within the canvas page of an application, which is controlled by third party developers rather than Facebook. We constantly review our policies to ensure that these third-party ads meet the expectations we have for user experience."

Rules and Regulations

Here are the rules for the new URLs, which will also apply to the usernames of all newly registered accounts:

• at least five characters
• alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) only (plus a period or full stop)
• users can only choose a single new username/URL for their profiles and each of the Pages they administer (a separate FAQ for Page administrators is available here)

Facebook reserves the rights to "remove and/or reclaim any username at any time for any reason," and will work with intellectual property rights holders to prevent users from claiming trademarked terms as their usernames. This will also give brands a chance to differentiate their 'real' Facebook profiles and pages from potential impostures (even though many of them would probably just be fans).

Obviously, there will be quite a landrush on Saturday, and given how popular Facebook has become, we expect that a lot of users will line up for their vanity URL on Friday night. So if you have a relatively common name, you might want to put this time and date in your calendar.

The new Facebook Page updating feature at hellotxt, available here, lets page admins post messages, photos, or video links to the Wall of different pages. They've actually implemented this feature in a clever way that should appeal to admins who have to keep up multiple pages as they let you tag your networks and Pages with keywords. That way, when you need to update a particular set of networks, you can prepend your update with the pound sign (#) followed by the keyword in order to update just that one particular group.

Ping.fm, the newer of the two services, has also implemented Facebook Page updates and tagging. However, in their case, they don't support tagging as a workflow timesaving feature for categorizing posts, but rather as a methodology for inserting hashtags into your posts - such as what would be used on Twitter, for example. They also support "mood tagging" on networks that support it and have added in a feature for posting songs courtesy of Grooveshark.

The process of setting up your Facebook Pages on Ping.fm is a bit more involved, too. Where hellotxt simply has you add a Facebook application, Ping.fm makes you go off an get an application key which has to be copied and pasted into a box before you can access your Facebook settings. Once there, it's not even clear if they've correctly identified your page or if those settings refer to your user profile instead.

For the individual, Ping.fm will probably suffice in most cases, but it's clear that hellotxt is the service to choose if your job involves updating multiple sets of social networks or Pages.

Is Facebook after Grandma and Grandpa now that they have mom and dad? You bet.

You then have the option of inviting more members to join the group. In Step 2, there are boxes provided to enter in the names of your family members already on Facebook. If you need more boxes, just click the green plus sign below. Finally, and likely the reason why Facebook created these groups in the first place, there is an option to invite other people in your family to join Facebook.

You can type in email addresses by hand or import them from your email address book. (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple Mail, and many others are supported.)

The group, once created, looks like any other Facebook group with a Member List, Discussion Board, Wall, Events Section, etc. However, there's a big difference between this group and others you'll find on Facebook. It's a completely private group, not visible to anyone else.

Facebook explains this in the "Group Type" box:

This is a secret group. It will not show up in your profile, and only admins can invite members.

In other words, you can post away in here without worries that your online friends will see your activity. The only exception to this, unfortunately, is with the events. When you go to create an event within the group, it's shared either with your local network (in my case that's Tampa Bay) or all of Facebook. The supposedly "secret" group is listed as the host of the event. So much for privacy. It would have been nice to use this feature to track family gatherings, but there's no need to broadcast every anniversary and family reunion to the entire social network that is Facebook.

Sadly, this Events section is yet another example of how Facebook forces public sharing on you even while pretending they're offering you a completely private venue.

Still, assuming you have enough family members willing to join Facebook - and based on these latest statistics, it's likely that you do - this new feature could end up being a great place to communicate and share content with your family. In fact, we expect that this single feature may even lead to an explosion of Facebook sign-ups from Grandmas and Grandpas everywhere. It might even attract some of the younger kids away from MySpace so they can hang out with the family on Facebook. On second thought, maybe not. it might just make Facebook look even more like that uncool place online where all those grownups hang out.

Thanks to AllFacebook for discovering this new feature!

Of course, the interesting fact about the Coca-Cola page is that it wasn't even created by the Coca-Cola company, but by two fans (according to AdAge, there are now over 250 Coca-Cola fan pages on Facebook). Indeed, looking at some of the other top pages like the Nutella page, we are quite sure that it wasn't created by Ferrero either (and neither was the Ferrero Rocher page, for that matter).

Popular Pages

As we explained in detail last week, Facebook Pages are not without problems. Over time, Facebook will merge these public profile pages with the standard Facebook profiles, but for now, they are an integral part of the Facebook experience and are very popular with brands and advertisers, though judging from the PageData statistics, Facebook's users are also using them heavily as alternatives to Facebook groups.

PageData makes it possible to keep an eye on which campaigns are succeeding, but also to track developing (and dying) memes on Facebook, as the most interesting data is not so much in the leaderboard, but in the lists of top gainers and losers.

Here are a few other facts we noticed while looking at this data:

• There are a high number of pages in languages other than English among the top gainers.
• A large number of the top gaining pages do not belong to public figures or brands (which was the reason why pages were introduced in the first place), but are 'novelty' pages like 'pizza,' 'cuddles in bed,' 'ice cream,' 'dormir,' or 'Los besos no se piden, se dan...'
• FML (FMyLife.com) was already quite popular, but over the last few days, it managed to add more than 100,000 new fans every day