I am not a member of the Facebook generation, so my love affair with Facebook does not date back to high school or college. It took me a while to warm up to the community, but slowly I saw benefits as prospects, clients and friends dropped by our fan page, left a comment or clicked through to our website.

As Roundpeg invested more and more in our relationship with Facebook, love blossomed, and it became our largest source of referral traffic most days.  But this love affair has had its share of bumps along the way:

•  There was the day they decided to change the dimensions on custom landing pages. Of course, we had to re-do all our artwork as well as pieces for multiple clients who were actively using the landing pages for conversion.
• I was annoyed the day they eliminated of FBML after I went to the trouble of learning how to build custom landing pages.
• Disappointment was the emotion when they eliminated multiple landing pages, so the micro sites we built on Facebook were now useless.
• I felt completely powerless when they changed their landing strategy so first-time visitors automatically came to you wall, instead of the lovely welcome screen you had built.

It was hard to trust Facebook, because every time we built something that seemed to work, we had to cross our fingers and hope it would be around long enough to be worth the effort.

Facebook wooed me back with the huge cover image which gave us such a creative space in which to work and multiple ways to display images in the timeline which really got noticed.

Just when I thought we would live happily every after, Facebook appears to be  going through a mid-life crisis. In an attempt to raise advertising revenues, they are reducing the visibility of posts in the timelines of our fans. Overnight, our interaction fell dramatically. Even people who liked, shared and comment routinely are no longer seeing our content, unless we agree to promote the post.

This may be a case of case of too much ego getting in the way of common sense.  Yes, Facebook drives traffic, but in our business, it is a long  way from a web visit to a client, and the ROI isn’t there to pay for too many posts.

So Facebook has me questioning our relationship at the same time that LinkedIn is working really hard to win me over. They have always been the steady, rock solid,  sensible member of the social media community. Not too exciting, LinkedIn is a reliable extension of my address book. Every improvement they have made has been built on the solid foundation they have established. Now with their sleek business to business environment, bigger and better status updates, and  improvements to their company pages, I have to admit, LinkedIn is downright charming.

Status updates are sent unfiltered into the streams of people who follow Rounpdeg. I can easily extend the messages by posting updates to my timeline or in groups of which I am a member. While Facebook is trying to control our timelines for profit, LinkedIn is opening the gates wider, because they have a working revenue model.

The bottom line? LinkedIn is closing the gap with Facebook in terms of traffic driven to the Roundpeg website. And the quality of the traffic is better, more serious, business-oriented prospects . While I am not ready to settle down to just one social network, Facebook is going to have to come up with a pretty grand gesture to win back my heart this time.