Not so huge news:

Social networking sites are making it more difficult for marketers to use stealth tactics to market to (and spam) its members. Personally I think that is great as the truly good marketers will rise like cream to to the top! Deceiving customers and annoy the masses is not a good business practice!

In 2009, with over 350 million active users (click here for source), Facebook really took off, replacing MySpace as the marketer’s adult web 2.0 playground of choice.

Some of the ‘oops’ I’m in your face marketing mistakes:

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.

Facebook fan pages to the rescue!

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.

Facebook’s projected revenue for the year 2010 is over $710 million.

They’ve grown to over 350 million members and that number will continue to soar.

“Who wouldn’t want to play in that marketplace? “- Maria Gudelis

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.

Tip:  Competition for 2010 may heat up, so learn to tweak your campaigns early on.

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