Yes, there are dozens of groups on Facebook, almost all with the same annoying people posting the same annoying things. I’m not just talking about the thralls of empower network scammers or the clueless Indian guy who doesn’t get that we don’t really care about who is looking at our profile – but instead the dozens of actual people working in the industry who embarrass themselves daily.

Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about, feel free to check them off as they go and note specific examples:

 1)   The Persistently Annoying Job Hunter. Seriously? Facebook is not a job board, and nothing says “Nobody wants to hire me” more than posting a dozen times a week that you are still looking for a job.  It also says to any potential hires that you are more than likely going to spend all your time on Facebook instead of working, linking to all the pretty things you see on Pinterest.

2)   Weird CPA Network Owner Looking for Offers. If you are using Facebook to try to find new clients, you’re probably not doing that well or have any relationships with real advertisers. Are you aware that the same people who are your potential affiliates are also reading this and will start to pay attention that you are getting all your clients from bigger networks? We probably already don’t take you seriously, but at least get a grip and don’t reveal to everyone that you are more lost about this business thing that we thought.

3)   Flaming Affiliate Manager. Unless you own or founded one of the companies that you represent, you need to learn to be quiet about your business. I don’t know how many times I see $15/hour affiliate managers attack other people online,  and more importantly, attack better and more reputable companies because they don’t understand the business. It’s a sure way to lose your job and become the persistently annoying job hunter. You almost as annoying as the people who use Facebook to bitch about their business problems.

4)   Flamboyant Guy Posting Shirtless Photos. I don’t care how much you work out, how many tattoos you have, but as soon as you take off your shirt and ask other guys to comment on your photo, you may as well just sign up for ManPlay.com and get it over with.

So what is Facebook for then? It’s for completely wasting your time on, joking with a few people and annoying the heck out of people who also are wasting your time. If you think that anything serious is going to happen from Facebook to help your business, you are either on crack or use that as an excuse to look at photos of Flamboyant Guy Posting Shirtless Photos.

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Amongst today’s internet marketing topics, one of the more popular ones is Facebook’s new Page Post Targeting option. The problem is, there isn’t much about this new feature that you don’t already know. I mean, we’ve seen Promoted Tweets with enhanced targeting capabilities, Promoted Posts on Facebook, and even their Recommendations Bar. All of these new advertising features have come out within weeks of one another, leaving very little time to measure their success before possibly moving on to the next big innovation in social media marketing. These new Targeted Page Posts work exactly how you’d expect them to, but I am not sure that they will bring the success that everybody is so excited about.

For businesses who use Facebook to engage with customers and promote products and services, a new way to target customers is always a good thing. According to AllFacebook, an unofficial Facebook Blog, these new posts can be targeted using various criteria that users post about themselves. A lot of the criteria are bits of information that people only post on Facebook, as other social media platforms don’t give the option. Anyway, these targeting criteria include age, gender, “Interested in,” relationship status, language, education, workplace, and location be it your city, state or country. The blog quotes Facebook in saying, “This will allow advertisers to more efficiently reach the right fans and increase the relevancy for people when they see page posts in their news feed, which overall leads to increases in engagement rates for page posts.”

In their post, AllFacebook asks readers if they think this targeting technique will be beneficial to advertisers or marketers. Well, of course it has the potential to be successful in marketing, but it is nothing we haven’t seen before. Plus, these Targeted Posts only allow for businesses to target certain peoples’ News Feeds, while every post they make still shows up on their own page. Therefore, you’re company page is basically ruined for anyone else, because when they visit the page, all they’ll see is a bunch of advertisement posts that weren’t meant to be targeted at them. Surely, this will make them lose interest right away, and your advertisement will have lost its effectiveness. Sure, it wont always be the case that Targeted Posts cause this cycle of redundancy, but it’s just an example of what too much improvement at once can do.

Advertisers are getting very excited about the numerous new methods for social media marketing, and that is completely understandable. Social media marketing is still growing and people are still curious. But, if you don’t know how successful the last method was for you, then it probably isn’t smart to hop over to a new method right away. Advertisers should get a feel for the last method’s effectiveness before moving on to similar techniques from different social networks. That way, you can see how the new things are working for others, and take the word on the street into consideration. It’s definitely exciting to learn of new advertising tactics, but don’t jump ship on old methods to quickly unless you’re already in rough waters.

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In the internet marketing world, things have really come down to three main options–social media, search, and email. Of course, social media has become the most popular choice, due to high traffic levels and the successful results people usually find with the networks. However, what is starting to happen is people are putting far too much focus on social media, and much less on the other two options. Email and search are much more helpful for advertisers in some areas than social media, but people tend to think that social marketing can do it all. So, to prove that more focus should be directed to these other options, Monetate, a company that specializes in marketing technology, has released a helpful infographic showing what email, search, and social media bring in for results in different areas of marketing.

The entire infographic focuses more on email marketing, but I want to focus on the very top of the image. It shows three different areas, each of which is not led by social media. To begin, Monetate demonstrates results from research on average “Add-to-Cart” rates per session. In this area, email leads the way with an Add-to-Cart rate of 10.91%. This is followed by search with a rate of 7.09%, and then social media with 2.28%. So, clearly it is email that tends to cause people to go through with purchases of advertised products, rather than search or social.

Next comes something that all advertisers are constantly working on–conversion rates. During the session of April 2012 to June 2012, it wasn’t social media that brought the higher conversion rates, but it was email leading the way once again. Email had an average conversion rate of 4.16% during the session. That beats out search by almost 2%, and social media landed very low conversion rates at .48%.

Finally, the third area that Monetate covered was average page views per session. Going in, I figured that this area had to be a win for social media, but once again social marketing came in last on the list. During the session of April to June 2012, search led the way in page views at 10.58%. Next came email marketing with a 9.64% page view rate. Social media wasn’t as far off in this category as the others, landing a 5.49% page view rate. Sure, it is easy to understand why search would lead the way in page views, but social media just seemed like it would be the winning candidate, because of things like traffic levels and advertising technique.

Anyway, the point of Monetate’s infographic is to ensure that advertisers aren’t spending all of their time and money on social media marketing while these other valuable options were bringing in better rates in certain areas. The company shows that the projected spending for email marketing by 2016 is $2.5 billion, that is of course if people begin to take advantage of it more often. If you’re interested in improving your email marketing, the inforgraphic continues on to give advice and tips on how to increase email marketing conversions and create successful email marketing campaigns.

We know that one of the more important aspects to any type of marketing is finding out how and where to reach consumers in a chosen demographic. Mobile marketing is no exception, in that with such a wide range of mobile platforms and uses for mobile devices, it isn’t easy to pin point exactly where to place an advertisement to reach those you are trying to target. However, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a project of the Pew Research Center, gives some insight into the main uses for mobile devices among mainly adult consumers. Their studies may not exactly be recent, conducted in January of 2012, but there’s good reason to believe that their results can still be helpful.

To begin, one writer named Aaron Smith, who is part of the project, wrote an article commenting upon adult mobile device users’ in-store mobile communication. He writes that 38% of mobile owners used their devices to contact friends while in stores for advice on product purchases. 24% used their phones to look up reviews online of products they were interested in and 25% used their phones to look up prices online to find out about better pricing elsewhere.

Another study that was part of this project pertained to mobile use during television programs, calling those who use their phones during television viewsing, “Connected Viewers.” While 38% of those asked said they used their phones only to keep occupied during television commercials, 20% used their phones to visit websites that were mentioned on television. These stats show that mobile and internet marketing and television advertising can quite successfully coincide with one another.  Overall, 52% of cell phone users that were surveyed confessed to being connected viewers.

Now, the more important thing that the Pew Internet & American Life Project brought to my attention was the amount of adult users that have started taking advantage of location-based services on mobile devices. Geolocation services have become a big part of mobile marketing, and now that more adult mobile users are starting to use location services, there could be increased success in the near future. An article on eMarketer reports the findings of Pew’s project, saying that 74% of smartphone users overall access location-based information services. “By the end of 2012, eMarketer forecasts, roughly a third of all mobile phone owners will access social networks via their phones—essentially double the number that did so two years ago—and 85% of mobile social networkers will use Facebook.” The main reason for mobile users accessing geolocation services is for social purposes.

So, mobile marketing can expect to see a big boost in location based advertising targeting adult mobile users. Pew’s information gives insight into exactly what adults are using mobile devices for, which can be a big help for mobile marketers that are trying to target them. This is good, because most mobile users are in a younger age group, making targeting adults on mobile platforms a bit more difficult. So, maybe with the information the project provides, mobile marketers can get a better idea of adult mobile usage.