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By tomorrow, Facebook Pages will automatically convert to Facebook Timeline–so publishers, agencies and other organizations should take some time today to clean up their new pages.

Facebook has published a Pages Overview Guide (PDF link) that can walk you through many of the new features. If you want to see examples of how brands and organizations use Facebook Timeline, check out Magnolia Bakery, Hyundai Worldwide or Ben & Jerry’s.

We’ve collected some helpful hints to walk you through the entire process. Keep reading…

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

At the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, Social Reality EVP of publisher relations Kristoffer Nelson offered some tips for book publishers looking to use Facebook to promote their books and grow their audience.

His company has worked on social media campaigns for major companies like Snickers, HP, General Mills, Coke, Ford, Kellogg’s, Bayer, eBay and Bank of America.

Here’s more about the firm: “Social Reality is a leading facebook app network and developer, reaching 300 million monthly users. We help brands leverage the social graph to increase brand equity — turning facebook users into loyal fans and ambassadors.”

After months of preparation, Marvel Comics has launched its first Facebook game, Avengers Alliance.

Follow this link to play the game, fighting crime alongside the famous superhero team. Earlier this year, we interviewed comic book writer Alex Irvine about his work writing for the game.

Irvine also shared tips for aspiring video game writers–you can explore the growing field in our Best Video Game Writing of the Year feature.

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Author Alex Epstein is releasing his latest collection of short stories as a Facebook photo album. For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings includes 88 pieces of ‘micro-fiction’ which have been saved as images in a Facebook  photo album to create what he is calling a Facebook book.

He explains the writing process in this blog post: “This project is still evolving when I write this; the thing that surprised me from the beginning was to witness (amazed and to be honest a little petrified) how hundreds of people, simultaneously, were reading the book “cover to cover” (by liking story after story), minutes after it was published, almost in real time.”

eBookNewser has more: “Electric Literature has published a sample from Epstein’s collection on their Facebook page, which will be translated from the original Hebrew into English.”

 

You may not know it, but Facebook’s Open Graph tool is sharing your app activity in all corners of the social network. When you use apps to play a game, listen to a song or share your books on Facebook, the network spreads that information to your friends in different ways.

Facebook unveiled Open Graph last year, a way for publishers to design applications with sharing in mind: “After a user adds your app to their Timeline, app specific actions are shared on Facebook via the Open Graph. As your app becomes an important part of how users express themselves, these actions are more prominently displayed throughout the Facebook Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker. This enables your app to become a key part of the user’s and their friend’s experience on Facebook.”

At the Inside Social Apps conference last week, Facebook director of product management Carl Sjogreen explained how publishers can incorporate Facebook Open Graph into new apps: “you have to think like a user: ‘what are the things you’d want to show off on Timeline, show off to your friends, what are the things you want to share?’ Those are great things to enable with Open Graph because it makes Timeline richer.”

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Facebook announced this week that the Facebook Timeline feature will be mandatory for all accounts soon, inspiring excitement, concern and a Jeffrey Koterba cartoon.

Check it out: “Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you’ll have 7 days to preview what’s there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it.”

After editing our own Timeline page last year, we’ve included six steps that writers and publishers can follow to make sure they have a satisfying Timeline page before the program launches.

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At some point this quarter, Marvel will unveil its first Facebook game. The Disney-owned company hopes that Marvel: Avengers Alliance can compete  with popular Facebook games like Farmville.

The game already has a Facebook page with 20,000 likes. Follow this link to watch a trailer for the upcoming game.  What do you think?

Our sibling blog Inside Social Games has more: “The game will be a combat RPG set in the wake of “the Pulse”, a galaxy-wide disaster that has made New York the target of almost everyone in the entire pantheon of Marvel villains. Players will take on the role of a junior S.H.I.E.L.D agent, tasked with gathering the world’s superheroes together into teams to protect the city. Disney is hoping the game will balance between a casual audience and serious Marvel fans, so despite its source material, the game will not be a hardcore-player focused title.”

Just in time for Halloween, novelist Anne Rice wrote a Facebook post critiquing Twilight–comparing Stephenie Meyer‘s vampire characters to Rice’s famous Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac.

Rice wrote: “Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town —- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.”

What do you think–how do the two vampire books stack up? The post has already generated more than 8,000 likes and 1,800 comments on Facebook. (Via)

At Mediabistro’s Socialize West conference last week, InfiniGraph CEO Chase McMichael offered some simple advice to improve your Facebook page.

His advice focused on some common problems that affect publishers, authors and readers on Facebook.

1. Make a Facebook landing page. Users with a specific landing page (instead of a regular Facebook wall page) generate 44 percent more engagement with Facebook users. Follow this link to learn how to make a landing page.

2. Don’t focus on Facebook “likes.” Focus on how many people come back to your site after they click “like.”

3. Don’t pipe your Twitter feed straight into your Facebook page. Only put the most popular and engaging content on your Facebook page.

4. Don’t throw contests to get thousands of Facebook “likes.” This kind of “likes” create an artificial audience. Most of these readers will never come back.

5. Weekends are the best time to post content on Facebook. Take the most popular issue among your readers during the week and pose a question about it on Facebook on Saturday or Sunday.

 

Simon & Schuster has launched a book club site on Facebook called “Something to Read About.” The club will open on October 12th with a discussion on Jaycee Dugard‘s memoir, A Stolen Life. Readers can join in from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET.

Follow this link to browse the site. Here’s more: “This new page is designed to enhance readers experience with books and authors by featuring a variety of activities and events including a spotlight ‘Book-of-the-Month’ title, moderated conversations about favorite books, a listing of authors from all Simon & Schuster’s imprints who are available to call into reading groups, favorite book club selections, and daily updates. Fans of the page will also have direct access to videos, photos, a book-specific discussion forum, and excerpts as well as opportunities to interact with some authors and enter contests for free books.”

October’s book-of-the-month title will be Alice Hoffman‘s The Dovekeepers. Jodi Picoult‘s Sing You Home will follow in November and Kathleen Grissom‘s The Kitchen House in December. The site also has two book club samplers available with excerpts from popular authors including Phillipa Gregory, Chris Cleave and Samuel Park.  What do you think?