Facebook Offers officially started rolling out today so local businesses can use their Facebook pages to promote their brand and new products directly to their customers, sending items straight to users’ news feeds.

Facebook Offers is free to create and any business with a Facebook Page can create Offers.  Facebookers just need to click on the “Get Offer” button to redeem it.  Though it may seem risky for small businesses, Facebook stated that Offers will only reach a limited number of people.

This is Facebook’s second attempt in entering the daily deals market.  Their first entry was when they introduced Facebook Deals back in November 2010.  But because of poor traction, the service was retired in August of last year.

Facebook Groups for School

Facebook is going back to their roots with the new Groups for School.

If you didn’t watch the Social Network or read about how Facebook got started, you probably don’t know that Facebook used to be called The Facebook, and it was a social network for colleges, requiring an .edu e-mail address to join.  So the launch of Groups for School is kind of an homage to the original network.

Groups for School is dedicated to students with an  active school email address which would allow them to join groups at their college or university.

Facebook engineer Michael Novati stated that Groups for School can be used by students to “discuss classes, for your sorority to plan upcoming events, or for your dorm to share photos.”  They’ve also added file sharing “to make it even easier to share lecture notes, sports schedules or class assignments.”  It’s available to some schools for now, but they plan on making it available internationally.

Speaking of groups, a lot of people are pissed at Facebook because of the changes that happened in their Groups.  The update happened about a year ago when old groups were archived to give way to the new group format.  The problem with this is that group members would be lost unless the group was eligible for an upgrade.

“I have a couple of Facebook groups that were created a few years ago and had like 4,000+ members each, and they’ve now been “migrated” to the new group format… (“migrated” good and hard) and it looks like now the only “members” are the people who were admins before, which is like 6 people,” one Facebooker said.  “Did Facebook really just throw away 4,000 subscribers on me?”

The value of your social media post

If you’re addicted to using social networking sites, like you need to tell everyone what you’re doing or where you are (i.e. Blah Blah is reading a book at home), I’m betting that within a day, you probably tweet or update your status several times.  Ever wonder how much you’d earn if tweeting or updating your status has monetary value?

Well, you don’t have to guess anymore.  Backupify, a backup provider for cloud-based data, decided to put a value on your social media posts.

According to Backupify, Yelp reviews are valued at $9.13, individual tweets $0.001, a Foursquare check-in ia about $0.40, Path updates are valued at $0.50 each, antiquing photos on Instagram is worth $18.52, repinning on Pinterest amounts to $28.09, updating your Facebook status is valued at $104.46, while LinkedIn posts are valued at $118.34.

So how did they come up with those numbers?  Well, Backupify took the amount of content users provide and divided that number into either the companies’ valuation or annual revenue.  A user’s worth was also determined by taking the valuations of each company and dividing those numbers by how many users they have.

Posts on social networking sites are free, unless you’re getting paid to advertise, but even if they aren’t worth anything, remember to think before posting because it can get you in a lot of trouble, or if you’re lucky, it can get you a book deal and a TV show.