At the Facebook Marketing Conference that was live-streamed on Wednesday, February 29, 2012, Facebook unveiled some interesting and important new marketing solutions for businesses both big and small. There are several key points from the conference that TechCrunch decided to highlight in a recent article. Overall, the general goal that Facebook seems to be striving towards is creating a more streamlined ad experience that would improve the user experiences of its site, and force businesses to develop more creative SEO and social media marketing campaigns that feature engaging content.

One key point is the changing of Facebook brand pages to the Timeline format, which has already been offered to regular Facebook users to adopt at the beginning of this year. The Timeline offers brands the opportunity to present content in a relatively attractive way, and not restrict themselves to the consecutive time sequence that had been the norm since Facebook's early history.

A major change that will be coming to brands' Facebook pages, however, is the removal of the "Like" button. Heretofore this was used to create involved interactive experiences for the fans of brand pages, as well as to enhance the authority of companies and brands on Facebook and the web in general. Many marketers aren't too happy about this feature being taken away.

The introduction of the Reach Generator ended up being one of the more significant highlights of the Facebook Marketing Conference. The service is primarily aiming at large companies which have big spending budgets, and is thus priced accordingly. What the Reach Generator offers to marketers is the option to pay a fixed fee based on the number of their brand pages' fans. Facebook then guarantees that 75 percent of those fans will be exposed to ads of that brand over the course of the month, and around 50 percent will be exposed to that brand's ads each week. This amount of exposure can significantly benefit those businesses that are able to sign up for them.

The other main points of the conference can be reviewed here. It will be interesting to see the new SEO and social media marketing initiatives businesses will be rolling out under these changes.