As social media content continues to find its way into search engine result pages (SERPs), interesting new data reveals just how much traffic is referred to our s facebook pages from search. The folks at the very useful Facebook analytics engine PageLever published their analysis of over 1000 fan pages with 10,000 fans or more and found that 33.98% of the referring traffic to these pages came from one of the three major search engines.

Since the widespread adoption of the tablet as the content consumption platform of choice, the industry has been eagerly anticipating the rise of the Internet TV as the next disruptive platform to change the way we thing about digital content consumption. Is it happening? Sort of, but not as quickly or with as much innovation as we had hoped. With the drop in price of the Logitech Google TV set-top box and the announcement by Viewsonic that it is deep-sixing it’s plans to build a Boxee powered TV, there is growing evidence that the marketing for this technology is softening. Or is it just that the right forces have not yet come together to make this technology take off?

As I have had the opportunity to experiment with an increasing number of Facebook ad campaigns, I feel like I’m starting to get a feel for how to use the platform to best effect. I’m sure that we could get some great input from all of you as well but the approach I’d like to talk about has to do with taking a layered approach that includes fan page enhancements, regular facebook ads and sponsored story ads used in combinations. I think this layered approach is the best way to address the issues of new fan acquisition, engagement and leveraging a fan base in one concerted effort.

Spinning off this recent article that lists the Top Eight Social Media Campaign Management Tools I thought I’d add two more that I like and make it an even 10 tools that can really help social media marketers better engage their audiences and track results. There is a always a great deal of movement in the industry as new services launch and existing ones change hands or get acquired. My hope is that this list will still be accurate at least 17 seconds after I publish it.

Foursquare, a location-based micro-blogging service that launched in 2009 seems to be on the verge of relevance. In preparation for their marketing push at SXSW they announced that they have added 500,000 new members bringing their total to somewhere in the 1 million area. Additionally, they are launching a free analytics service for business owners so that could create interesting marketing opportunities for businesses that are based on foot traffic. I’m rooting for them because this could become a very interesting marketing medium.

The concept of marketing to people based on where they are at any given time took a big leap forward as Facebook and Twitter recently announced the introduction of geolocation features to accompany user posting activity on their services. Combining their efforts with those of the already established players in the space such as Yelp, Foursquare, Latitude, and Gowalla, it seems that 2010 will be a year of great experimentation for this feature. Time will tell whether marketers and application developers can make this feature useful enough to consumers that they will want to enable it. However, it seems likely that we will soon see software platforms that allows us to monitor social media for people who are nearing our location and message to them thereby combining real-time search with real-time marketing.

I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

For a short while this past week, there was an accidentally revealed document floating around the web that shows some potential upcoming developments in facebook marketing…and they are definitely ideas that will make business page owners very happy. The document itself is no longer anywhere where I can link to it but there is this useful article about it on the Inside Facebook site. Here’s the high points:

“What are other people doing and what’s really working?” We got a sneak peak at some of the valuable information in The 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa. The accompanying chart shows us which social media marketing tactics are most often used and considered most effective by our marketing peers.

OK I know that acronym thinking is trite and that many of us have already heard about the POST methodology until we want to PLOTZ. But, I have been speaking with many companies lately about their social media plans and I have to admit that this old methodology keeps coming up as the one of the best places to start. Here’s a quick review of how it works and why it works so well for social media plans in my opinion.