If you’re wondering if branding your company on a social network is important, you only need to look at today’s headlines.

Facebook has beaten Google in weekly hits. This means that people have gone to Facebook more often than Google, which is really amazing when you think about it. People have more of an interest in exchanging media and information with one another than searching for information.

Why this is important: Social networks are now having more of an impact on Internet users than the Internet’s largest search engine.

But as always, make sure the social network you decide to get on is right for your company.

Buzz is circulating around the internet that Facebook may launch its commerce platform in April. But what does this mean for brands?

Well, for one thing, tracking metrics may be available for purchases made on Facebook. Things like browsing time, cart behavior, and other deep metrics may become available to brands advertising or selling on the new platform.

What this means to Facebook users is that they’ll be able to purchase from brands without having to interrupt the Facebook experience. Definitely a win to marketers who had to drag traffic away from Facebook to complete sales.

On the flip side, look for stories to develop around brand hijacking, phishing fan pages, and security concerns regarding this platform.

Will it be worth it in the long run to be an early adopter of this new commerce platform, I’m not sure. But one thing is for sure, it’s worth investigating further.

If you are reading today’s blog post after clicking on a link from Facebook, Twitter, or our LinkedIn account, odds are that we know about it.  Tracking people across the Internet is  nothing new, but link tracking is becoming more and more important.

There are a number of URL shortening services out there that allow you to take your target website’s URL and shorten it to something easily pasted into a Tweet or status update.  The benefit to this (aside from being able to copy/paste easily) is that most of these services come with dashboards that allow you to perform tracking analysis quickly and easily.

Now when people ask where website traffic is coming from, you can tell them which online channel is driving the most traffic.  And best of all, most of the services provide real-time tracking data for instant report generating.

So when it comes time to report on which digital marketing channel is working and which ones need to be tweaked, you’ll have all the answers at your fingertips.

Not long ago, e-mail marketing was considered cutting edge. Today, every teenager knows how to filter your company’s e-mail into their spam folder.

So what happened? Online media (social media) became the go-to source for information. With a quick search, anyone can find out about your company, and more importantly, how your company is perceived online.

Your web site is no longer the end all be all of your online presence. Blogs, web videos, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Wikipedia pages, and a myriad of other content created by consumers, journalists, competitors and anyone with an Internet connection now inform people as to what your company is all about.

The democratization of the web means that your company has to take part in the ongoing conversation happening all over the web. And that conversation is going to happen with or without your participation.

So what can you do to adapt to this new way of looking at the web? The answer is: you have to monitor, converse and create. Monitor what is being said; converse with the people talking about your brand; and create engaging content in order to spread your message in a way that is meaningful to your target audience.