MASHABLE — So your business is on Facebook, and brand engagement is up thanks to some savvy social media strategy. You may even be interested in further distinguishing your brand by building a custom landing page for your account. But what kind of value does a custom Facebook Fan Page offer? What are your fans looking for on a social network that they can’t get from your business website? For some insight, let’s check out how some big-name brands have stepped up their engagement by investing a little more TLC into their Facebook presence...

ADWEEK — For all the excitement about social media, there's a specter hanging over its use by companies. Is all this tweeting, blogging and Facebooking paying off? For some proponents, the question is irrelevant. They agree with the view encapsulated in the social media bible The Cluetrain Manifesto -- markets are conversations. Companies have to participate in the conversations where they're happening, ROI be damned. Their dismissal of metrics is summed up in an oft-repeated question, "What's the ROI of putting on your pants on in the morning?"...

E-COMMERCE-GUIDE.COM — Twitter can be an important marketing and customer service tool for businesses, but it’s easy to make mistakes. A business owner may hear about Twitter and decide to jump on the bandwagon and wrongly expect this micro-blogging service to be a substitute for a marketing or customer-service plan. The best way to get the most out of Twitter is to incorporate the tool into your current strategies. Remember, Twitter can help your business -- but it is not a complete solution on its own. We take a look at one company’s Twitter success and discuss the strategies it uses...

FINANCIAL TIMES — It was the tale of two Tweets. In June last year, Habitat, a UK furnishing retailer, found controversy when it used messages posted on the Twitter social networking website to promote its furniture sales. That same month, computer maker Dell reported selling $3m worth of refurbished hardware, also via Twitter. Dell’s experience was widely heralded as a success; Habitat’s led to apologies as it linked its promotion to unrelated subjects such as Iran’s election and Apple’s iPhone. These experiences show how difficult it is for large brands to read the mood of a social network – but many are now trying to achieve just that...

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLORER — Marketing on Twitter continues to be one of the most talked about subjects in social media today. The social media purists still sing campfire songs about how you can’t do it. Dell is up to $6.5 million dollars in sales there. While I strongly believe there is no right or wrong way to use Twitter -- you can find an audience for anything on any medium with a certain level of critical mass -- I believe Twitter to be a mainly conversational platform. With that, I have noticed four major types of marketing styles emerge among those using Twitter as a marketing platform, each with examples of large followings, audiences and (probably) successes...