Today, September 29, 2011 is the last day you’ll have the option to message all fans of your business page.

If you have a message to send to your fans, it’s now or never.

Why?  It’s part of Facebook’s larger goal of discouraging people from using Facebook for push marketing.  Facebook is about relationships — inspiring, engaging, and entertaining those who interact there.  Consider this recent Facebook change only the tip of the iceberg with respect to how businesses use Facebook for advertising.

If you maintain a Facebook Business Page (formerly a Fan Page), it’s the end of the world as you know it.  Businesses will soon feel the push to create content, context, and conversation as users exercise their ability to unmark a Top Story.  Users will have more input in identifying boring, useless, or spam-like content, causing it to fall from popular view.

In addition to this “dislike” feature, simply clicking like on a particular story will be worth less and interaction from users will be worth more.  Importance will be on Top Stories that have not been unmarked by users.  Creating quality content that spreads to other users will be of utmost importance, and  business pages will feel the crunch as they struggle to create value for their fans.

If you administrate a business page and want to keep your fans involved, consider your content carefully before posting.   If it’s not something that will inspire, engage or entertain your users, you should think twice about posting.  Continually posting boring and irrelevant content could get you branded as just another business churning out spam.

Twitter feeds everywhere are exploding with articles about the new Facebook changes rolled out recently (September 2011).  The overwhelming sentiment is that users are disgruntled at best.  Surprisingly, a survey conducted by Sodahead, a social-voting site, showed that teen users expressed the strongest dislike of recent changes.

But aren’t teens more accustomed to change than the more aged contingent of digital immigrants who use Facebook?  Apparently not.  The largest populations of those who actually liked the recent changes were IT workers, those who reported having incomes over $100K, and college students.

IT workers have long been vocal about their dislike of Facebook.  At a recent legal technology seminar on Social Networking, the presenter’s opening words were, “This seminar will not discuss Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.”  IT workers, especially legal IT workers, choose to ban Facebook rather than attempt to work with the privacy and technical obstacles it presents.  IT workers still dislike Facebook.  They just dislike is less after the changes.

Those with incomes over 100K are likely more accustomed to change.  They change their car, smart phone, house, watch, wardrobe, computer more often than those with less disposable income.  Higher-income users embrace change in daily life, work, socialization because their status permits it and even demands it.

College students change classes, majors, girlfriends, and housing accommodations because their transitory position in life revolves around it.  Just try to get through a University degree without a rescheduled class, or changed class time, instructor, roommate, or job.  Adaptation to change is a requirement of student life.  And most of those students use Facebook on a daily basis.

Why don’t teens like the new changes?  Teens are consumed with keeping up with changing bodies, voices, peers, and parental influence.  Later in life they will have increased income, IT exposure, and college experiences to nudge them through the jungle of modification acceptance.

So what’s the lesson from the latest Facebook transformation?  If you want to stay afloat in technological times you’re going to need to embrace change.   If you don’t, you end up in the non-IT, lower income, teenager-like groups who don’t like the new Facebook.

Or you could get a horrible rash — just ask any baby.

Here’s how:

1.  Click on the “Account” tab in the upper right corner
2.  Click on “Account Settings”
3.  At the bottom on the right click the blue “deactivate” link
4.  Under “Reason for leaving” click “This is temporary.  I’ll be back.”
5.  Click on “Confirm”
6.  Enter your password in the box and click “Deactivate Now”
7.  Enter the words in the security check
8.  Click “Submit”

To reactivate your account, simply log in again with your email and password.  Easy!

This morning Facebook apparently closed a loophole that previously allowed pages to tag individuals.  In the past, an admin of a page could check a box for posting preferences to “Always comment and post on your page as Tugg Social Media even when using Facebook as …”  Previously, when this box was checked, an individual could tag anyone who was a friend of the individual.  The post would show up as if the page had tagged the individual.

Although last night (6/21/2011) this feature worked, this morning it has been disabled.  When posting on the page, the options to select individuals does not work.  One can only select other pages to tag.

Why has Facebook done this?  It’s yet another attempt at forcing INDIVIDUAL communication on Facebook rather than granting individuals the option of posting as an entity or page.