According to eMarketer, Facebook will surpass MySpace in terms of ad revenue this year, with Facebook expected to bring in $605 million in ad revenue compared to $385 million that MySpace is expected to nab.  With such a phenomenal growth in audience and engagement metrics, there is no surprise many online marketers have their eye on Facebook.

Omniture and Facebook announced that they have teamed up to provide online marketers with tools that help them with media buying and optimization on Facebook making Facebook a stronger marketing channel.

The outcome of this partnership, which builds on the Facebook’s wealth of social media data and Omniture’s analytics capabilities, includes an automated media buying process as well as a single dashboard to plan, deliver, measure and optimize advertising campaigns. Utilizing Omniture’s toolset, marketers can compare Facebook Ad campaign metrics alongside their other media channels.

This tool empowers online marketers to better engage customers/prospects on Facebook and promote the most relevant content, marketing messages, products and services.

Omniture clients will also benefit from this new partnership as it helps them generate reports specifically designed to understand the effectiveness of their Ads for Facebook elements such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Twitter seems to have finally found a way to monetize its social media platform. Following their deals with Google and Microsoft to provide them with real time search, there are rumours that they are ready to launch their advertising platform.

Google has been long a believer of ad relevancy and they pioneered the concept of Quality Score to promote and reward the most relevant ads. Twitter seems to follow the footsteps of Google.   According to Twitter`s head of product management, they are planning to make the ads relevant and useful so that they are seamless and users do not think of them as ads. 

We have to wait and see if they can succeed in incorporating the ads in the tweets without negatively impacting user experience.

Social Media Consultant

As I mentioned in my previous article on real time search, there would be more real time news feed added to the sources of real time search.  Google just announced that starting this week, they added the content of My Space to real time search.  Now Google provides a pool of news, photos and blog posts published by MySpace users.   Google ranks the updates by relevancy and freshness.  

Social Media Consultant

With the ever growing popularity of twitter and its role in providing real time news that search engines were not traditionally able to provide, Google decided to strike a deal with twitter and include real time search results on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Real time search is the new addition to the Google Universal search which can potentially impact the face of web marketing and SEO. The real time results take up a significant portion of SERPs and can potentially push down your organic rankings below the first fold. This shows the importance of taking real time search seriously and join the micro blogging stream.

Currently real time searches seem to show mostly for hot trends and event related searches. However, we have to see how this will trend moving forward.

Even though twitter is the application that is most known for providing real time search, there are many other applications that provide micro blogging and RT search including but not limited to facebook, friendfeed, and Orkut which could join the fleet of real time search.

Social Media Consultant

Google announced earlier that by enhancing Google Profiles they give people a greater control over their online profiles when somebody searches for their names on search engines. Google has already started showing Google profile results at the bottom of US search queries for people names.

Currently only 4 profiles are shown for name-query searches. These results provide snippets from user-generated Google profiles and link to the profile pages. From your Google profile you can link to your blog, LinkedIn profile, or Twitter account. Currently the links are not using nofollow. However, that might change as spammers might start building bogus accounts just for the sake of link building.

By providing links to your other sites from your Google Profile, you can help Google better build a Social Graph of you on the Internet. Google can potentially use this data to better understand the relationship between sites, decide how to flow PageRank, and further personalize search results.

As Google Profiles evolves, Google will add more functionality to the product which will provide Google with more insight into people`s social connections.

Even the Google Profiles are currently shown at the bottom of the SERPs, they could potentially rank on top of the search engine results pages which could potentially divert the traffic from major social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter providing Google with more real estate/platform for socio-demographic advertising.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SMO Expert