It’s good for your site to have promotions and giveaways that are accessible from your Facebook page. These can drive all kinds of traffic to your site, boosting it as well. Polls are popular, as are links to YouTube channels. Some third-party apps require you to go to another site and set up an account, which is usually free. But the apps are easy enough to put on your Wall, or you can give them their own tabs.

You’re really missing out if you aren’t using Facebook to market your business. It is one of the easiest ways to do so, and chances are you already know people on Facebook that you can personally nudge toward your business page and ask that they become fans and sign others up. You don’t get the kind of “viral” spreading of your message on any other medium than social network sites like Facebook.

You can even track social media success by using sites like SocialMention.com (see screen shot) to see how much buzz there is in the world of social media about your brand.

Sometimes you may want to have an all-out assertive social media campaign built around a new product launch or other big event, and other times you should keep on with a perpetual social media campaign to keep the drumbeat of your brand going in people’s minds. Social media is important enough that any webmaster should devote regular time and attention to it, just like any other aspect of business. Good use of social media (meaning no spam, ever) can make the difference between a site that has mediocre traffic and sales levels and a site that makes regular, solid progress in those areas. Don’t let your website be left out of the social media revolution.

Start by “listening” to the latest chatter about your niche or product. Use tools like Social Media Firehose to aggregate the latest and greatest about a product or niche (see screen shots for aggregating chatter about the topic “Nexus One phone.”). Once you have a sense of the general conversational climate, create accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, build up a community, and start interacting. At first, it’s a good idea to listen more than you talk. Start small, by commenting on blogs, doing the occasional re-tweet, or announcing something going on with your company, like a sale. Gradually increase your interaction until you have a real conversation with the customer community going on. It’s amazing the things you’ll learn.

Social media marketing is basically a 21st century version of word of mouth advertising that goes much faster than it does in the face-to-face community. It’s a chance to build your brand and shape your reputation for the long haul, so don’t miss out or let your competition take all the social media love that’s out there.

What may end up setting Buzz apart from the others, however, is the geographical information that can be associated with Buzzes that originate from your mobile phone. If you happen to see a celebrity, say and wanted to share a picture you snapped with your Droid or iPhone, you could do it, and use Google Maps to give it a geographical tag.

It could potentially be an alibi killer as well. If you were to tell your spouse or the police you were at a certain place at a certain time, and someone had photographed you and geo tagged you at another place and another time, you could be totally busted. But with the exception of the geo tagging option, this isn’t that much more of an alibi buster than a regular camera phone with a date and time stamp.

Google has taken some flack for just how wide open the Buzz platform is, and it has already tightened some of the privacy settings. But it will take a little time to find out just how many novel uses this new platform can be put to.

With the new search engine, content is still very much king. The real-time features will tend to boost social media sites that are discussing relevant topics. The age of the site will no longer matter as much as it used to.

However, and this is important for anyone with a website they want to rank high in the search engine results pages, the speed with which your page loads is going to be even more important. People are impatient, and they don’t want to wait around for a page to load, particularly when there are millions of other pages available that might load faster, so if you have a slow-loading site, beware.

One thing that people asked for while Google was in the “sandbox” phase of developing the new engine is for sites that haven’t been updated in a long time to rank lower, and while it isn’t certain yet, it is widely anticipated that this will indeed be the case.

The bottom line is that drumming up interest in your website(s) using Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to hurt your PageRank, but it’s probably not going to help it that much either. That said, showcasing your site on your Facebook page, plus having several of those little social bookmarking buttons (Digg This! etc.) on your pages can certainly help build up back links, particularly if you enlist in friends to social bookmark a page in hopes of getting it on the front page of the particular site.

In other words, PageRank “juice” doesn’t flow directly from Facebook or Twitter, but it can cause users of those sites to do some squeezing of juice in your direction if they’re so moved.

Whether this will change with the complete roll-out of real time search with Google Caffeine is debatable. But if you regularly use Twitter, it looks like it can be a good way of hedging your bets, particularly when you’re trying to build up a good stable of back links.