Creating a fan page on Facebook is relatively simple and it’s easy to copy and paste a web address onto the page for visitors to click on. People who are fans of your website can “like” it on Facebook and encourage other friends to like the service as well. Since people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook, it’s a pretty easy way to get people to view your site and interact with your visitors by announcing news or promotions.

Twitter is another social media network that is gaining prominence on the web. Twitter simply allows users to post “tweets” to other users who are following them about news, activities, pictures, and other information (or in Lindsay Lohan’s case, too much information). An ever popular website with celebrities and news media alike, Twitter is an informal way for you to interact with people who utilize your website in 130 characters or less. It also a great way to promote news on your website.

Myspace is also another website that is utilized by many businesses and web promoters. As the grandfather to all social networking websites, Myspace was the former king of social media networks before Facebook exploded. Today, it’s popular with musicians and promoters who are targeting a younger market. Myspace tends to focus on the younger preteen market (Facebook traditionally catered to college kids and older), but it does have a feature that allows Twitter to update its feed automatically, but if you’re wanting to attract as many visitors to your site as you can, don’t discount the former king of social networks and create a Myspace page to promote your website.

Many of us could see things like coming but many people continue to focus strictly on website SEO rather than how they will implement their social media optimization. With local trends it gets even more important to think about how you will combine locally targeted search with real time SEO.

By watching trends and acting in real time on a local level the targeting is more focused since the “heat of the moment” is on and you know in real time what people are looking for and WHERE they are looking for it at.

I remember testing location based services when I was in a product house at Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs) around 2001 or so, it is amazing to see how far things have come. We could see where things were headed then but the the move to social media was not foreseen.

It is amazing how even very non-tech focused people are moving easily into services that  a few years back they would of considered too geeky or complicated.

Why? Because with local and trusted peer relationships on social networks they feel comfortable because all their friends are there….

In summary, we know  these trends will not always be based on search terms that are business focused but creative ways to take advantage of this tool will come to light, I look forward to seeing them.

For more info check out Mashable.