There have been 3 major Facebook-related news announcements this week which are directly relevant to us multi-channeled sales promotion marketeers:

1. A new study finds correlation to how many Facebook Friends you have and how socially disruptive and narcissistic you are
2. PG Tips top a recent chart of the most socially-engaged brands on Facebook
3. Facebook announces 7 changes to how you can represent your business on Facebook

Interestingly all the above are inextricably linked but how are they relevant to sales promotion and do brands really want to engage this type of consumer anyway?

The main thrust of the study "Narcissism on Facebook: self promotional and Anti-Social behaviour" asserts that people who scored highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory quesionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The 294 strong study group was monitored for the most socially divisive aspects of narcissism: Grandiose Exhibitionism (GE) and Entitlement Exploitativeness (EE). Ghastly American Acronyms (GAA) they may be, but in behavioural terms these are people that need to be the centre of attention, say shocking things for effect and reveal too much about themselves to avoid being ignored (sounds like C-list celebs to me) and can have a sense of deserving respect and a willingness to manipulate and take advantage of others.

Meanwhile UK performance marketing agency iProspect has launched an index which measures Facebook Engagement. It's called the iProspect Facebook Engagement Index and it explodes the myth that the number of Facebook Likes = Brand Engagement. ( We hate to say we told you so). They measure what proportion of your fans actually interacts with your brands by liking, commenting, posting, responding to polls or other communications. At the top end of the index PG Tips achieves 16.3% while the brands with the highest likes achieved engagement index scores of 1-2.5%. iProspect rightly draws the conclusion that the EE and GE prone Facebookers can easily be bought by offering short term competitions or similar fan-bait in return for Likes but real engagement requires brands to design their pages to be 'social by design' with content that consumers actually want.

Funnily enough Facebook may have just pulled the rug from under brands who opt for marketing bribes to secure likes. At their recent Facebook Mission Control Conference they announced 7 new measures designed to make Facebook Pages tell more of a story and be less of a bulletin board.

1. New Cover Photo and Profile Image. Both of these can be much bigger than previously allowed but you can no longer embed a call to action in your cover photo - i.e. no 'Like' before proceeding limitations.
2. Larger Highlighted and Pinned posts. You can make photos, videos etc bigger and pin them to the top of your timeline for a week at a time.
3. Display Company Milestones. Visually engaging way of displaying your company history.
4. Customisable Apps Buttons. Gone is the default landing tab - unless you've set it up already, but you can have 12 applications which you can showcase of which the top 3 rows will be displayed. You can also change the App avatar to express a call to action etc.
5. Facebook Offers. This is about to ramp up considerably. Like Groupon for the social narcissist. Could be interesting but there doesn't appear to be a limit on how many of your offers are claimed so make sure you can cope with demand!
6. Insights admin and messaging. Built in ability to get in touch with fans easily and manage how your page is configured and displayed.
7. Facebook Advertising. The biggy here is the introduction of the Reach Generator which will allow your advert to penetrate 50% of your audience each week instead of the typical 16%.

One thing is for certain. Social media is still relatively young but the way brands use Facebook and, more importantly, what Facebook will let brands do on their platform, is going to evolve considerably as both sides of the relationship work out what is possible with this unstoppable entity.