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A new study-turned-infographic from Mr Youth suggests that social media interactions influence consumer purchasing tendencies. The data was collected during the three-week period of time leading up to, and including, Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Yet despite glowing percentages about social media users - 65% of users recommendations led to a purchase, and recommendations by social media users were twice as likely to lead to holiday gift purchases - brands apparently are not responding to consumers on social media sites.

Facebook just confirmed with us that it's testing a feature that would allow people and Pages to communicate privately. This update was first spotted by communications agency WeAreSocial.sg. The private messaging feature would give customers the opportunity to speak privately with page owners. This is actually another Twitter-like move by Facebook.

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.

Last week Google+ introduced brand pages, an almost exact match for Facebook Pages. While Google now claims that Google+ is not a competitor to Facebook, the Pages products are so similar that they are bound to go head-to-head. Brands are going to end up getting more value out of one or the other.

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.

Two weeks after the launch of Facebook's hybrid news feed, impressions per post dropped -25% while likes and comments are up +9% and +21%, respectively, according to data from an Edgerank study of 3500+ Facebook pages over the time period of 9/3-9/17 and 9/24-10/8. This data remains consistent with the first week's numbers, which showed that impressions per post were down -33% while likes and comments went up +18% and +17%, respectively.

Facebook is offering up to $10 million in free advertising to small businesses in the middle of slight changes to how the social networking site allows brands and consumers to interact on its Pages.

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.

Over 40% of a brand's Facebook page fans "unlike" the page as soon as a campaign ends, suggesting that a lot of follower activity on the social network is driven by agency interaction, not a real loyalty to the brand, according to a new study.

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.

New Facebook users now see a list of some of the most often "liked" Pages on Facebook when they sign up for the popular social networking service. New users get the option to choose from about 100 popular Pages. These Pages mostly belong to celebrities, brands, news outlets and politicians. Eric Eldon first wrote about this new addition to Facebook's sign-up process on Inside Facebook and notes that this list is "clearly designed to get users engaged immediately." To some degree, this list is similar to Twitter's now defunct Suggested Users List.

Today on the Facebook blog, Alex Li announced that Facebook would institute a number of new, or newish, features that will multiply the connectivity of the community. These features are Community Pages and Connected Profiles.

"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.

According to Download Squad, four days ago Cheryl Smith's picture appeared next to a Facebook ad targeted towards her husband. The copy was not only inaccurate, but a little disturbing, "Hey Peter, Hot singles are waiting for you." As far as we know the Smiths are not into kinky role play and Facebook has not built an amazing new relationship compatibility algorithm. In actuality, Cheryl is the unfortunate victim of the fact that Facebook Facebook's 3rd party application developers have used our mugs to advertise to our friends.

We heard rumors about this for at least the last couple of weeks, but today, Facebook finally announced that it will allow users to pick and choose their own vanity URLs. Instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=432123451, you will now be able to pick something like http://www.facebook.com/ihazvanityurl as your URL. Facebook will open this new feature up at 12:01am EDT on Saturday (that's 9:01pm PDT on Friday). At that time, Facebook users will see a notice on their homepages with instructions for how to obtain their new URLs.