Aren’t you glad that the social networking sites are making it more difficult for marketers to use stealth tactics to market to (and spam) its members? Even if it’s fruitful for you, it never makes you feel good to deceive customers and annoy the masses.

In 2009, Facebook really took off, replacing MySpace as the marketer’s adult web 2.0 playground of choice. There were some drawbacks, though. You had people complaining that their friends were only talking about business opportunities – and some complaining that they didn’t care to know the personal aspects of their friends lives because they were there to conduct business.

Many marketers decided to clean their friends’ list and open fan pages instead – reserving their official Facebook profile for close friends and family only. Facebook has a lot to ensure their income continues to soar with this influx of non-college students.

Their estimated revenue for the year 2010 is over $710 million. They’ve grown to over 350 million members and that number will continue to soar. While it’s traditionally been a closed site, Facebook is now working to connect its own member content across the World Wide Wide, enabling members to share on their own websites or blogs via Facebook connect.

Facebook will continue to lead the social networking scene when it comes to globalization. It started with a nifty translator that enables you to participate on the site in more than 70 different languages.

One thing is for sure. Facebook’s going to have to find a way to help its members avoid spam. Right now, anyone can send you a message without even having you confirm them as a friend.

That means you’ll get all sorts of spam content – from the long lost relative with the same last name who wants you to pay her $14,000 so she can transfer $1.4 million into your account to the cutesy women who want to chat with you, big boy!

Users of Facebook will be hyper-sensitive to any changes the site makes in regards to the privacy of their content, after 2009’s fiasco of announcing they officially owned your content and then going back on that statement to put out all of the fires that started.

Advertising is rampant on the site, so more marketers will be looking for ways to pay to play there. Right now you can run an AdWords-like campaign on Facebook, targeting individuals by age, location and more. Then you create an ad, choose PPC or pay per impression and track your conversions. Competition for 2010 may heat up, so learn to tweak your campaigns early on.

Post from: Internet Marketing Blog

Facebook Marketing 2010

Twitter rose from the lowly ranks of new microblogging social networking sites swiftly. Some say an entire Presidential campaign was won partially off the viral nature of this site – but regardless of whether or not you believe that, there’s no denying it can be a very powerful method of reaching a large audience.

The problem to date has been to determine just how to single out the right people to communicate with. With the implementation of robots to add friends or auto-follow people, you never knew if those who reciprocated your follow were even interested in your products or services that you market online.

In 2009, Internet marketers learned how to get traffic to their domains, blog, Squidoo lenses and forums simply by devising a potent Tweet and sending it out to the web-o-sphere.

They learned how to personalize their Twitter profile page, including product images, tag lines, and hyperlinks to important sites. Some lucky users were grandfathered with the ability to have an animated avatar (which catches many eyes) before Twitter nixed it to the masses.

Just before the end of the year, the site created a Beta test version of list options, that supposedly wasn’t available to everyone using the site. With lists, you’re able to take the people who you’re following and categorize them, allowing you to read the Tweets of one particular group at a time rather than wade through hundreds or thousands of Tweets that might just be a courtesy follow instead of a true interest.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, is going to help marketers out by allowing you to open a business account for the year 2010. It will be a paid version of the site, but you’ll get perks such as analytic tools to help you focus your message more precisely.

You can’t blame Twitter. It must be horrible to have developed such a powerful social networking site that’s become a household name and still not be profitable. That’s the primary goal of Twitter in 2010 – to make acquisitions of developments that help them make revenue for the site. As marketers, we’ll be paying the bill for things we use, but hopefully well be reaping the rewards and our ROI (return on investment) will make it well worth it.

Another 2010 forecast is that your Tweets will soon be indexed in real time on both Google and Bing. As any marketer can tell you, this is wonderful for those who are marketing trend products and services and want to defeat their competition using effective keyword-laced Tweets that result in decent conversions.

Post from: Internet Marketing Blog

Twitter Traffic 2010