The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently published The Demographics of Social Media Users, detailing the demographics of social media users by age, ethnicity, household income, gender, urbanity, and education and platform. It's no longer enough to broadly assume that "everyone is on Facebook, professionals are on Linkedin, and women are on Pinterest." Our thinking about our online audiences, and potential fans, must be more sophisticated. If an organization works with urban youth, then look to Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter. If you want to engage young adults, think beyond Facebook to Twitter, Pinterest and Instragram. If you want to specifically attract African-American stakeholders, do not leave Twitter and Instagram out of the mix.

What is the Seattle Public Library doing that is so radically different than 90% of the Facebook Pages out there? Offering value. In the case of the Seattle Public Library, they've clarified the intersection of what they can offer, and what their Facebook fans want. That intersection is a personalized, customized, online library experience. And boy, are they offering value for a Like.

M & R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network have just released a critical report about Facebook benchmarks which seems to validate a lot of current assumptions, and sheds light on previous unknowns. The report analyzed Facebook Insights from July - December 2011 of 37 very large nonprofit organizations, such as the AARP, Human Rights Coalition, and Oxfam America. The resulting report offers some insightful benchmarks for large nonprofit organizations: average number of Facebook fans, the reach of a Facebook update, who sees the updates, the average number of people who will be Talking About This per 1,000 Facebook Fan users, and more specific benchmarked types of engagement.

A friend recently asked me: "What are you excited about now in Facebook?" Without hesitation, I replied, "Facebook Groups." Yes, Facebook Groups, not Pages. Facebook Pages were never designed for real and deep community-building, and I've begun to believe they will never be successful at this. Written off and abandoned by almost every organization I knew once Pages beefed up its functionality three years ago, Groups is where the real community engagement is happening now.

The introduction of timeline apps are the next iteration of Facebook's strategy to know everything you like on the web and what you're doing right now. Besides giving Facebook a lot of information about what you like to do, the new open graph timeline apps will also give application developers a lot of information about what you like to do. The potential benefit for organizations that develop timeline apps is two-fold: offer greater exposure within Facebook to potential supporters, and accrue valuable personal information about supporters that use the application. I think this is a potential game-changer for how brands and organizations will use Facebook. In this blog post, we review what is a Timeline app, how it works, who has developed them already, and the potential of Timeline apps for engagement. I'm personally a bit doubtful about whether or not it will deepen online engagement, which I consider at the end of this blog post.

What is your organization's primary topic of conversation online? If you don't know the answer to that, you may find that is the crux of the issue with your online strategy. Without knowing and owning the online conversation topic, your organization is doomed to wander aimlessly about in the online desert. To get at this, I often ask this simple question: "What about your industry or issue is so interesting that you want to have a conversation about it?" Taking this simple question a step further, I'll often ask: what topic of conversation is interesting to potential fans, can define your organization, but isn't about the organization itself? Knowing your conversation, then owning it, offers a map through the online desert to real engagement, trust-building, and advocacy. This post includes three examples of nonprofits who really know what their conversations are about, and execute them superbly.

Facebook's newly-revised Insights is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. With the new Insights metrics, Facebook is boldly telling the Facebook community and its competitors that the most important social network metric is real online engagement. Everything about the new Facebook Insights is focused on helping page administrators understand how well their page's content is being received, shared, and talked about within Facebook. Facebook believes that you should know and need to know how engaging your content really is. And they want you to do something about that. In this post, I analyze why it is such a bold move, why engagement matters, and what a game-changer the new metrics has become. This is the future of measurement.

This week I'm launching a regular blog feature called "New and Improved on the Social Web." In this regular roundup, I'll be highlighting some of the latest changes and iterations to social media platforms, apps and tools, and commenting on their implications. This roundup includes an overview of delicious' new Stacks feature for creating shareable curated bookmarks around a topic, and two important changes to Facebook's pages, open commenting feature and new Facebook Insights.

I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of Ramping Up Your Facebook Engagement to a group of NYC nonprofit organizations last week. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices for designing Facebook Page engagement, practical ideas for creating engagement on the Page based on recent research, and measuring engagement and ROE. During the presentation, I also heard about some great ways that nonprofit organizations are using Facebook successfully to engage and move people to action.

Recent research on Facebook fan activity from Lithium and comScore offer three big takeaways for organizations that manage Facebook fan Pages. Lithium's research offers relevant benchmarks on how fans like to interact with a Page, how often, and how deeply. comScore's data illustrates where fans interact with fan Page content, how Pages can reach more fans, the role of friends of Fans, and how likely Fans are to visit the organization's website and use its services or purchase products.