What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.

How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features into their products that helped spread the word.

Let me explain.

Emoticons no longer have to be anonymous smiley faces representing simple emotions. Facebook Chat now lets you use the profile picture of any user, official Page, or event on the service as an emoticon. That means you can make one out of your best friend, Chuck Norris, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama or anyone else. This opens up a whole new way to express complex emotions. Here’s how to do it:

Consumers and marketers have vastly different perceptions of and expectations about Facebook likes, which presents a problem for marketers who are slow to move, but an opportunity for those who pounce on it.

That’s based on a survey of more than 1,300 consumers and 132 senior marketers, conducted by Lithium and the Chief Marketing Officer Council.

The top three reasons why marketers believe consumers like their Facebook pages were:

Most people have yet to publish their timelines, since the feature only became available across the site last Thursday and Facebook has a seven-day grace periodfor people to choose what to put on the advanced profile before it publishes for the entire world to see.

I wonder whether the grace period effectively extends the testing of this advanced profile, since Facebook can respond to feedback from the less-technologically inclined types who have just begun to tinker with the timeline over the past week. Even techie types continue to find things that might resemble bugs as much as features.

We’re all learning about how best to use timelineright now, so it’s probably a good thing that brand pages haven’t migrated to this new layout yet.

While we do know that Facebook is working on upgrading brand pages, no dates have been given for anything new and it’s unknown what the changes will be. Most likely individual users’ experiences with timeline will dictate whether the social network will extend the format to pages.

Meanwhile, timeline profiles have other implications for brands on Facebook.

Whitney Parker is vice president for user experience at Brazen Careerist, where she co-hosts a bootcamp on how to create and implement a social media strategy.

It’s no secret that jobs in social media are becoming more prevalent in nearly every industry nationwide and even globally. A quick search on Indeed returns nearly 30,000 openings in the United States alone.

But what might not be obvious is what, exactly, young professionals should do to position themselves for these emerging roles. And no, it’s not enough just to have a Facebook Page.

Before timeline went live, it was actually possible to undo an upgrade to this advanced profile: Uninstalling the Developer application from your Facebook account would remove the timeline. But now all of this has changed.

A spokesperson for Facebook explained in an email to us:

Once you click “Get Timeline,” you will have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it.

If you choose, you can publish your timeline right away. If you decide to wait, your timeline will go live automatically after seven days. Your timeline will replace your profile.

By now we’ve all become waryof posts like this one on Facebook: “Costco is currently giving away $100.00 gift cards to all Facebook users!’

Alas, as of this writing, a bogus Costco gift card scam was live on Facebook.

We have no doubt that the social network’s immune system will detect the web address that the latest posts include and add the URLs to the security databases.

Just when you think Facebook has blocked every possible link to a particular scam meme, it returns with another web address. Southwest Airlines isn’t giving away 973 pairs of free tickets on the social network, and by now most people have learned that promises to that effect only lead to malware and spam.

After months of slow, gradual rollout, Facebook Timeline is now available to all users.

The Timeline is a radical redesign of Facebook‘s user profile pages, introduced at Facebook’s F8 conference in September. Instead of merely listing your interests and personal info, the Timeline shows a detailed overview of your life on Facebook, with the ability to check out what you’ve been out to at a particular point in time.

Even if you’re using the best marketing practices on Facebook, you can still take engagementand virality to the next level.

Best Practices

Let’s assume you’ve adopted some of the best practices of getting good results posting to your Facebook fans:

• Understand your audience and what they care about;
• Post content that doesn’t just say “me, me, me;”
• Use calls to action (“click like if…”, asking questions, or simply saying “tell us in the comments section…”) to get more engagement; and
• Look at the visibility, likes and comments of individual posts to see what’s working and what’s not.

In answer to the question above, approximately 18,400,000 Americans say yes, they got their current job through Facebook. Though Zuck’s platform ranks #1, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t have shabby numbers either — 8 million and 10.2 million Americans, respectively, have gotten their jobs through social platforms.

Judging from our Job Search Series, it should come as no surprise that being socially savvy pays off in the job hunt for two reasons — it helps you network, and it’s a highly marketable strength in your skill set, given all the openings in the digital space. So, it’s about time you spruce up those social profiles and start networking.

If you are searching for a job, whether you already have one or not, and you’ve got a profile on Facebook,you should make sure that all unprofessional photos and language are removed or blocked from the public. If you don’t,  potential employers may choose not to interview you because of inappropriate content.

Listed below are the steps you should take to make your Facebook profile is ready for your job search.