Happy Columbus Day weekend, marketers!

Do you have fun plans for your bonus day? Although you’re probably kicking back with family and friends, we didn’t want you to forget about the important marketing updates that are going on around you.

So instead of scrambling to read through hundreds of RSS feeds before work on Tuesday, take a look at this roundup of top marketing stories of the week.

Your Facebook Fans Are Hiding Your Posts At An Alarming Rate, From Fast Company

Are you more concerned with earning page likes or engaging the audience you already have on Facebook? If you chose page likes over engagement, you might want to be careful. Fast Company reported that. “1 out of 50 post views gets a negative response and Facebook fans are most likely to block ALL your page stories when they take a negative feedback action, 60 times more likely than unfanning your page.” Uh oh. So what does this mean for marketers? It means that you need to start focusing more on quality and less on quantity [of people who like your page]. Just because your brand has a lot of fans, doesn’t mean all of those fans are actually seeing your content. Focus on quality, keep a close eye on your frequency to make sure you’re not wearing out your fans, and always be experimenting with new types of content. To learn more tips on how you can engage your Facebook audience, read the full story from Fast Company here.

New LinkedIn Company Pages Are Finally Rolled Out to EVERYONE

Do you remember when LinkedIn announced the launch of their new Company Page designs on September 6th? With this announcement, only a select few brands actually had access to these new designs. Well now, this new design has rolled out to all brands! Do you know what that means? It’s time to get your own Company Page updated and optimized to suit the new look. If you need some help learning the ins and outs of the new Company Page designs, be sure to consult the Step-by-Step Guide to LinkedIn’s New Company Pages with tips and screenshots that show you exactly how you can leverage these changes in your marketing. In addition, make sure you check out the 5 examples of the new LinkedIn Company Pages here.

Tumblr Finally Gives Marketers Access to Analytics, From Mashable

Data is a marketer’s best friend. So when brands and marketers don’t have an analytics dashboard to consult to see what’s working and what’s not, they feel pretty lost. Have you been feeling this way with Tumblr? Well not to worry, because Tumblr has finally given marketers what they’ve been looking for all along: an analytics dashboard specifically for their Tumblr activities. Marketers can now use Tumblr’s preferred third-party analytics provider, Union Metrics, as a way to keep track of popular content, engagement levels, trends, and influential contributors and curators. The Union Metrics service will remain as ‘invite-only’ until November 2012, according to Mashable. Will you start leveraging Tumblr’s new analytics as soon as they are available to you? To learn more about this update, you can read the full story here.

Now You Can Follow LinkedIn Influencers, No Connection Required, From Marketing Land

It seems like LinkedIn is making changes left and right! First Company Pages get a face lift, and now users have the ability to follow top industry leaders and influencers through their personal profiles. For now, users can only choose from a list of 150 influencers to follow, but this list will be expanding over time. You can see that a person is an influencer when you see a ‘Follow’ button instead of ‘Connect.’ If you have always aimed to be a thought leader in your industry, now is the time to develop that thought leadership! Once this option rolls out to more influencers, don’t you want employees at your company to be included in that list? If you’re interested in learning more about this new ‘following’ feature on LinkedIn, you should read the full story here.

New Research Shows Email Marketing is Not Dead, From Social Media Explorer

You might have heard rumors that social media will kill email. Well, according to research from Social Media Explorer, this is simply not true. In a recent survey, a representative sample of over 3,000 American social media users 12 and older were asked if they read email from brand products or companies. Of those who responded, 61 percent say that yes, they do read those emails. Does this surprise you? Were you expecting more branded emails to be chucked into the spam folder or deleted without even being opened? We have always said that email marketing is arguably the most powerful channel for lead generation, so make sure you’re not underestimating this medium in your marketing! Are you interested to learn more from this survey? You can read the full story from Social Media Explorer here.

Did you encounter any other interesting marketing stories this week? Share them in the comments!

Image credit: kzirkel