Online marketing takes on so many different forms, but social media marketing has really taken off in the last few years. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't exactly doing it the right way.

Brian Carter of BruceClay.com just put up a blog post about the 10 biggest Facebook markteing mistakes of 2011.

So many companies have decided to jump onto the Facebook marketing bandwagon, just because they see everyone else doing it. Even people who are pretty good at utilizing Facebook from a social standpoint, the marketing side has been utilized in a less than ideal way.

Ironically, one of the mistakes Brian discusses in his post is that people overestimate the importance of Facebook pages. The assumption is that what you should do is build up that page and use it as a big marketing channel, but "less than 1 percent of page fans ever go back to your page." Are you wasting your effort?

Some of the other Facebook marketing mistakes include caring only about the number of fans, thinking about yourself instead of your audience, posting too frequently, and creating all the content yourself. Not surprisingly, one of the other big ones is ignoring your metrics. how else are you going to know if your marketing plan is working?

Do you do Facebook marketing? Has it been effective for you? Do you handle it in-house or do you outsource it to someone else?

What about trying to do affiliate marketing using a social networking platform called Facebook? I am about to have almost 200 friends on Facebook now, because I know this thing can make me money, through what? Promoting affiliate links? Of course I could promote, but in order to be safe, we must be aware that Facebook has banned lots of accounts for just promoting affiliate links and CPA (cost-per-action) offers.

Some of them are just joining groups base on their niche and to promote their products through posting their direct affiliate hoplink like Clickbank, Amazon, CPALead, etc., it's not going to work at all because Facebook is really smart at it when notified by their own system. Of course we can still make money on affiliate programs using Facebook, but how?

Here are some of my ideas:

1. When you attach a link, don't post your direct affiliate or CPA link to your friends' wall, groups or fan pages.

2. Create your own basic landing page using WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, Yola, etc., on whatever product you may promote. I suggest you include an image or banner of your product and attach a hyperlink which directs to your affiliate hoplink. Make sure that your content could be easily understood by the visitors.

3. Instead of direct affiliate or CPA links to be posted on Facebook, your landing page could be a good strategy on which your hyperlink was attached on the image of your post.

4. Create your own Facebook group and it should match to the niche of your product or offer, and invite targeted friends to join your group. If your offers are from targeted countries only, then you should invite only people who are within that targeted country.

5. Promote your landing pages on Twitter and social media sites, high traffic forums, social bookmarks or you can do some video marketing on Youtube or even create a simple eBook with your affiliate and CPA links and upload it to some free file sharing sites.

These are some of my own ideas and it can guarantee you success only if you are really smart to know what you're doing. This is where an affiliate marketer like me has to do simple but challenging things when it comes to affiliate marketing using Facebook as a huge source.

Matt Cutts have given the answer on how Google will rate the links from Facebook and Twitter. Here is the question that was asked to Matt Cutts "Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?". Matt says that Google will treat the links in the same manner whether it is from Facebook or Twitter, as if they were from any other site. The PageRank formula applies to all. The most important factor that is taken into PageRank is the reputation of the backlinks rather than the number of backlinks. Yes, quality really matters not the quantity. You must get your backlinks from relavant resources which have high reputation. Google will use a similar method to rank the tweets.

The links might still take time to pass PageRank as facebook has lot of private profile and links from this profiles will not get crawled by the search engines. The links from twitter are nofollow as of now. This doesn't mean that search engines will not consider the links at all. All the tweets are getting crawled and some tweets are even getting ranked. There are chances that the microlinks will pass relavant information to the search engines. The response of Matt Cutts is what most of the SEO's and Webmasters were expecting but now it is straight from the expert's mouth and we do have to take it into our strategy. We need to think whether to use a uncrawled platform or a nofollow platform.

Facebook has now come up with a feature similar to retweet. The feature is called "share". This seems to be Facebook's answer to Twitter's "retweet". This will help facebook to emerge as a platform where content can be shared and viral marketing can be made use of just like Twitter. Twitter feature of lists as well as upcoming feature of Contributors will make twitter a strong platform to market content on the web through social media. Google have already started ranking twitter lists just like tweets.There will be more improved features coming in the social media as the competition between Facebook and Twitter grows.

The battle between search engines and social media websites to dominate the most visited sector of Internet have started long back. The battle now seems to be more strong as Facebook have been the most visited website in US during three days in December. Facebook have overtaken search engine gaint Google and achieved this visitors stastics in US. Will this be a holiday trend or will this become a global trend ?. The days are Christmas day eve, Christmas day and New Years Eve. The information has been published on Hitwise US Twitter account. This trend of facebook trafficcould attract some US advertisers to facebook. The US visits to Twitter have increased 4% in December 2009 as compared to November 2009. This is a strong indication that Social Media websites are emerging as a competitor to Search Engine.

The top searched term in 2009 was "Facebook" as per Hitwise Information. This gives Facebook a competitive edge ahead of the other social media gaints to compete against the search engines. Facebook has moved 10 position as compared to previous year to gain the position of top searched word in 2009.

The growth of Facebook has made advertisers to think on moving their ads to Facebook as well. This will certainly make facebook to gain some dollars through the ad medium. Facebook offers lot of options for advertisers. Advertisers can target their audience based on age,sex as well as location. This will facebook a slight positive edge ahead of Google. Google is still the strongest search engine but they now have a strong competitor from the social media. Facebook can grow into a much powerful social media if they uses the strategy in the correct manner.Andy Atkins-Krüger CEO of WebCertain points out facts about facebook's chances of emerging as a real powerful social media website in the Global front in one of his latest post in Search Engine Land.

The third annual crunchie award winners have been announced by Techcrunch. Here is the list of nominees and winners:

Best Technology Achievement:
Backblaze
Bing (Microsoft)
Chrome OS (Google) (Winner)
Google Wave
PuSH
Silverlight (Microsoft)

Best Internet Application:
Animoto
Dropbox (Winner)
Groupon
MOG All Access
Posterous
Yelp

Best Social App:
Aardvark
Brizzly
DailyBooth
Farmville(Winner)
SocialVibe
StockTwits

Best Bootstrapped StartUp:
atebits (Tweetie)
Shoes of Prey
Tinychat (Winner)
Wildfire Interactive
wizehive
Wufoo

Best Mobile Application:
foursquare (Winner)
Google Voice
Gowalla
Kindle for iPhone
Skies of Glory
Tonchidot

Best International:
Amiando
Jolicloud
Playfish
Spotify (Winner)
TweetDeck
vente-privee.com

Best Time Sink Application:
Canabalt
Civilization Revolution (iPhone)
DailyBooth (Winner)
I Am T-Pain
Pandora
Zoosk

Best Design:
Animoto (Winner)
Brizzly
Chrome (Google)
Clicker
Facebook Mobile
Threadsy

Best Enterprise:
Amazon Web Services
Atlassian
Azure (Microsoft)
Chatter (Salesforce)
Google Docs/Office (Winner)
Yext

Best CleanTech:
CalStar Products
Locust Storage
Picarro
Sappphire Energy
Sun Run (Winner)
Tendril

Best New Gadget:
Apple Magic Mouse
Barnes & Noble nook (Winner)
litl webbookMotorola Droid
Sonos S5
Zune HD

Best Tech PR:
Brew Media Relations
LaunchSquad
OutCast Communications
PerkettPR
Spark (Winner)
SutherlandGold Group

Best Angel:
Betaworks
Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital)
Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC)
Ron Conway (SV Angel) (Winner)
Y-Combinator
Yossi Vardi

Best VC Firm:
Accel Partners (Winner)
Charles River Ventures
Benchmark Capital
Greylock Partners
Sequoia Capital
True Ventures
Union Square Ventures

Founder Of The Year:
Aaron Patzer (Mint) (Winner)
Elon Musk (Tesla)
Jack Dorsey (Square)
Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons (Yelp)
John Borthwick (Betaworks)
Omar Hamoui (AdMob)

CEO Of The Year:
Josh Silverman (Skype)
Marc Benioff (Salesforce)
Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Winner)
Neil Young (ngmoco)
Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)
Tony Hsieh (Zappos)

Best New Startup Or Product Of 2009:
Aardvark
Bing (Microsoft) (Winner)
Foursquare
Hunch
Milo
Spotify

Best Overall Startup Or Product Of 2009:
Android (Google)
Facebook (Winner)
LinkedIn
ngmoco
Twitter
Zynga

Source of Information : http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/08/crunchies-winner/