This week, Omniture announced details of its plan to integrate Facebook into its Web analytics system. The full integration won’t happen until later this year, but (assuming the software works as planned), it’s a sign that social media marketers are finally starting to get what they need: third-party analytics that show them how well social media advertising works compared to other kinds of advertising. There are dozens if not hundreds of social media analytics firms and tools, but only a few companies can bridge the gap between social and the rest of what marketers do, online and offline.

The other aspect of the announcement that is interesting is that Omniture will extend its search-marketing system, SearchCenter Plus, so marketers can also buy ads on Facebook. Presumably these are the self-serve performance-based ads that populate the right side of many Facebook pages, but it may include the branded Facebook engagement ads as well.

The Omniture announcement followed on the heels of another Facebook integration announcement, by Omniture competitor Webtrends. The new Webtrends Analytics for Facebook gives marketers the ability to measure the performance of fan page tabs, applications and shares.

Measurement and analytics are going to be big buzz words for social media marketing this year. Thus far, most marketers have focused on Website traffic as the default measurement tool.

As Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer’s CEO, writes in our recent Social Media Insight Brief “Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media”:

“Clearly, site traffic can be an important barometer of consumer interest for a brand, but on its own it cannot justify heavier investment in social media.”

The more social media sites can provide the analytics to show ROI beyond site traffic, the more successful social media marketing will become.

Sunday’s big game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts was nearly as splashy in social media as it was on TV.

Marketers that paid millions to advertise during the telecast also put sizeable energy into making sure that their ads had visibility on the social web. Coca-Cola Co. teamed up with Facebook to distribute Coke-themed virtual gifts and preview its Super Bowl spots for its fans. Pepsi notoriously bowed out of advertising during the game in favor of a cause-related digital marketing initiative that included a major presence on Facebook. Other marketers took to Twitter to keep their ads top of mind among consumers.

Even before the game telecast, the online buzz surrounding football star Tim Tebow’s ad for Focus on the Family was strong, according to Nielsen Co. In the two months ending January 31, the ad garnered 33.4% of all Super Bowl ad-related buzz online. Meanwhile, the NFL created a Twitter tag, #SB44, and encouraged fans to use the tag when they discussed the game.

With all the hype, what was the end result? The most-watched television event of all time. CBS estimates that the 2010 Super Bowl drew 106.5 million viewers, beating the famed 1983 “M*A*S*H” series finale, which was watched by about 105.9 million.

There’s no doubt that all the activity surrounding the Super Bowl is a signal that TV is finally getting more social, though we’re certainly not all the way there. While the coming onslaught of Internet-ready televisions will play a role, the entertainment industry has yet to figure out how to logically incorporate social media into the act of watching television. But they will.

The socialization of TV is one of eight trends that I cover in my new eMarketer Insight Brief “The Future of Social Media Marketing.” Some of my other predictions include:

• Advertising will not be the primary revenue driver for social media.
• Status updates will be key.
• Social will make search more personal—and more powerful.
• Social media monitoring will bring true insights.

“The Future of Social Media Marketing” is part of a series of eMarketer Insight Briefs focused on social media marketing. Available exclusively to Total Access subscribers, the seven briefs, along with a PowerPoint slideshow, answer the most common and most pressing questions that businesses have about social media marketing.

Total Access subscribers, log in and view the Insight Briefs now. Learn more about an eMarketer Total Access subscription today.

TechCrunch reported data from comScore yesterday that Web traffic to Facebook is now nearing that of Yahoo!. The world’s largest social network has already surpassed Yahoo in monthly page views, and will soon overtake the search engine’s mark of more than 594 million unique visitors. eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson recently shed some light on Facebook’s future growth potential, revenue opportunities, and how marketers can take advantage.

eMarketer: Do you see Facebook continuing to experience its recent huge growth in the future?

Williamson: I do see significant growth potential for Facebook, especially in developing markets. I believe it is reaching saturation in its original dominant markets: the US, UK and Canada. But there are many countries where its user growth is still quite large.

Here’s one data resource that shows that:
Mapping Facebook’s Recent Global Growth Versus Rivals

eMarketer: If the site does continue to grow, can it generate enough revenue through advertising to offset the huge costs involved in supporting so many users?

Williamson: Advertising has been Facebook’s main revenue stream since its inception. But I believe that this year will be the year that we see the company opening up significant new revenue streams.

One of those will probably be virtual currency. Another might be e-commerce, in which Facebook could take a cut of sales from any person or company that sells something within Facebook.

In a few years, I believe another source of revenue for Facebook will be analytics–selling information about its users to marketers, agencies and others who are interested. Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of consumer information and I am certain it is trying to determine how to maximize the revenue potential from it–without invading its users’ privacy.

eMarketer: Do you think it’s likely that Facebook will go public anytime in the near future? Or should its focus remain on generating revenue through advertising and other streams?

Williamson: I believe that Facebook does not need to go public anytime soon. It has a deep-pocketed investor in DST, the Russian firm, and its advertising revenues are growing nicely. I expect that it will generate $605 million worldwide in ad revenue this year, up 39% over last year. If it succeeds in creating some of the new revenue streams I mentioned above, it will be doing very well.

Related:

• Facebook’s Revenue Trajectory
• Social Network Ad Spending Trends for 2010
• Students Still Find Facebook Cool
• Facebook Now Has Yahoo In Its Sites, Already Bigger In Pageviews (ComScore)
• Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media
• What Social Followers Want

Can Facebook continue its momentum into 2010? Last week I wrote about TBI Research’s forecast that Facebook would generate $1 billion in revenue in 2010, a substantial increase from the $550 million TBI estimated Facebook would earn this year.

Today, eMarketer released my latest forecast for social network ad spending. I estimate that marketers will spend $435 million worldwide on Facebook in 2009 and $605 million next year, a 39% increase. My figures include only paid advertising (such as Facebook’s Engagement Ads, search and self-serve ads) and don’t include any other form of revenue, such as the money Facebook makes when a member purchases a virtual gift item.

Overall, I expect marketers to spend $2.2 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide, up 12% over 2009. In the US, spending is expected to grow 7.1% next year, to $1.3 billion.

The momentum behind Facebook has been one of the key social media marketing trends of 2009. But I believe several macro trends will play out in 2010. For Facebook to maintain its dominance (and potentially increase it) it will need to create ad formats that capitalize on these trends:

Earned media takes center stage. Marketers will look for better ways to manage and measure the impact of earned media—the additional free exposure that a brand gets when consumers talk about a brand online or share information about their interactions with it.

Social networks will challenge traditional local ad venues. By some accounts, Facebook’s self-serve ad system, which caters to small and local businesses, is generating a sizable chunk of the company’s revenues. With geolocation technology, local ad targeting and location-based services on mobile phones, there will be many more opportunities for local businesses to make their marketing more social.

Social combined with search will yield better results and more ad opportunities. Search will meet social by incorporating real-time content (e.g., tweets from Twitter and status updates from MySpace and Facebook) into search results, adding information from social network friends to search results, and using collective information from other Web users to hone search relevancy. These trends will yield new ad formats—and will raise new red flags for privacy advocates.

Social ad networks will expand. Expect more momentum behind advertising that is targeted based on information from social network user profiles.

Will Facebook succeed? Let me know in the comments.

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Yesterday, TBI Research released a research note projecting that Facebook will top $1 billion in revenue in 2010. This follows an earlier estimate of $710 million from NYPPEX, a private equity advisory firm.

In the note (covered by The Business Insider blogger Nicholas Carlson), TBI Research analyst Rory Maher said that the revenue estimate “demonstrates the strong growth potential [for] social media and local online advertising.” TBI Research is a part of The Business Insider.

TBI believes that Facebook’s success is coming from branded display advertising with premium CPMs; a strong self-serve ad program offering deep targeting; and attractive viral advertising programs. In addition, Facebook generates revenue through search and the sale of virtual gifts.

Of course, Facebook’s enormous growth over the past several months also has something to do with that. It now has more than 350 million users worldwide.

The local angle is of critical importance. Facebook now has enough mass that it can be an effective targeting tool for small businesses and local businesses. Based on personal experience, the ads can be quite sophisticated. I regularly see ads that know I have kids and that I live in Seattle. Today I saw an ad that knew that I am a fan of the Facebook page for “The Amazing Race.” I don’t find these ads creepy or invasive at all.

One thing the TBI Research note doesn’t really cover is mobile. So far mobile hasn’t been a factor in Facebook’s revenue stream, but many of its members access Facebook from their mobile phone. I expect Facebook will sell mobile advertising in the near future. Also still on the horizon are potential revenue streams from ecommerce, virtual currency and more.

Facebook has already been on a strong revenue trajectory in the second half of 2009. In May, I had projected that marketers would spend $300 million worldwide to advertise on Facebook in 2009. Clearly Facebook has blown well past that figure. How high will it go this year and next year? I’ll have more details soon, when my next social network ad spending report comes out.

One thing is certain: Based on my recent discussions with agency executives and other industry insiders, Facebook is now the premier destination for marketers who are using social media.

As companies build out their social media strategy for 2010 and beyond, many millions of dollars will be spent to develop and manage Facebook fan pages. The question will be just how much marketers will spend to buy paid advertising on the site. Facebook will need to keep pumping out the ad innovations, and it will need to give marketers proof that the advertising works.

Some people have suggested that students are becoming less interested in social networking, now that so many others (i.e., parents and other “old” people) are also using it. But according to survey results released on Monday by Anderson Analytics, college students are still overwhelmingly using social networks, particularly Facebook.

Anderson found that 82% of male students and 90% of female students considered Facebook cool. And just 6% of students reported not using a social network at all, according to data that Anderson Analytics’ Tom H.C. Anderson sent me.

This is certainly good news for social networks because, as Tom Anderson points out in his blog post, it means that sites like Facebook are truly engrained in students’ lives.

That said, I do think there are signs that students are using social networks differently than newer users might. In my recent report “College Students Online: Connecting With the Connected Crowd” (available to Total Access subscribers) I looked at data from Alloy Media + Marketing, which found that just 16% of students changed their social network status at least daily. These students also were highly likely to limit who could view their profile and to generally interact with only a small circle of friends.

These things indicate that Facebook’s push toward openness and lifestreaming—using social networks to publish regular updates about daily life and making those updates accessible to many people—may not necessarily sit well with college students. They may ultimately prefer to use social networks the way Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had intended: as an easy way to interact with existing friends and only a limited number of others.

So yes, students do use social networks, but it will be important to pay attention to how they use them and whether that is changing over time.

A timely opinion piece in the UK’s Observer on December 6. The title says it all:  “Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising to them.” Why? Because online advertising “really works” only in the context of search, where user motivation increases the likelihood of interaction with ads.

This is a familiar argument. Of course, we know that many social network users who ignore traditional ads respond favorably to other kinds of marketing. Well-crafted social media campaigns have produced solid and even great results in 2009. Around the world, advertisers will reap the benefits of Facebook’s huge audience in the year to come. But founder Mark Zuckerberg will still struggle to create a sustainable business, according to this article.

Today, digital agency Razorfish released its annual Feed study of “connected consumers” — a group that includes broadband users who have spent at least $150 online in the past six months, have visited a community site and have also consumed or created some form of digital media.

One of the key points Razorfish makes is that the primary reason these connected consumers interact with brands in social environments is because they want to get deals. If that is true, it could have major repercussions for the way marketers should think about social media and what their goals should be.

According to the Feed study, 44% of respondents said the primary reason they followed a brand on Twitter because they thought they’d have access to special deals. Among Facebook and MySpace users, 37% said the main reason they friended a brand was for the deals.

But I believe that marketers should not take the results of this study as license to act as if social networks are merely promotional playgrounds. Promotions are designed to drive immediate action. Brands that use promotions or deals to increase their Facebook fan count or boost their Twitter follower count may experience short-term success but then risk losing the attention and loyalty of those fans and followers unless they keep pumping out the offers and deals.

As the Feed study points out, Dell Outlet deserves credit for its use of Twitter to promote sales and special discounts. And Starbucks used promotions (such as a free pastry giveaway) to build its Facebook fan base to nearly 5 million. But what kind of fans are they? Ones that will be loyal only as long as the discounts keep coming, or ones that really want to interact with the brand over the long term?

One of the themes in an upcoming eMarketer report previewing the online holiday shopping season is that the tough economy has mainstream and luxury retailers alike returning to tried and true merchandising and marketing tactics. Recent eMarketer interviews with e-commerce professionals bear this out.

Kevin Ertell, VP of retail strategy at ForeSee Results, said that during the holiday season retailers will focus on proven marketing techniques like paid search and e-mail marketing and shed all the peripheral stuff. By peripheral stuff he means experimental activities on social media sites. A lot of retailers talk about Facebook and Twitter, Ertell says, but those forays still seem to be marginal tactics for now.

Scot Wingo, CEO of Channel Advisor, concurs. Many of the retailers he works with want to make sure they have good selection, good pricing and that their products are in the channels where consumers shop. Wingo doesn’t know many retailers who are saying they have to get their social strategy together. Sure, social is on their minds but as part of their long-term thinking.

Suzanne Hader, founder of 400twin, said luxury retailers are trying to connect with affluent holiday shoppers by emphasizing the quality and value of their products over their opulence. They have done away with the razzle-dazzle approach that was in vogue a couple years ago. Saks Fifth Avenue, for example, offers the Forever Handbag, with the implication being that by buying this bag a woman won’t have to buy one every single quarter.

Businesses are flocking to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter so they can be where their customers are. What many of them don’t realize is that they have to adapt their messages to the medium’s culture.

Zappos is a widely cited example of a company that understands this. In an interview with social media blog Mashable, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh summed up his philosophy: “I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal.” This approach allows customer to get to know a company and the people that work for it on a more personal basis. They can see how the retailer communicates and how it responds to the conversations on its Facebook page.

As Gordon Magee, Internet marketing and media manager at pet supplier Drs. Foster & Smith, told eMarketer, “At the end of the day, it’s the relationship that’s being developed so that you have a genuine desire as a company to provide customer satisfaction to the customer, and the customer trusts you enough to give you some money to have you send them a product through the mail.”