Despite Facebook being the media darling that it is, there have been considerable doubt over its potential as a marketing tool. Because some advertisers have been disappointed with Facebook's CTR, other have been decrying that Facebook is not a viable marketing platform.

Of course, these naysayers have largely misunderstood exactly how to market on Facebook. Basically, social media marketing on Facebook is about trust economies. This is why none of the 12 ways to use Facebook professionally have anything to do with conversions or click-through-rates.

So where Facebook actually falls short of marketing potential is in CPC and CPA advertising. Although these advertising media are only two parts of the very eclectic world of online marketing, they are (arguably) the cornerstones of online affiliate marketing. Well, it looks like Facebook is ready to accommodate them, after all. As Brendan Picha explains:

Facebook doesn’t let you insert HTML or Javascript normally though the ‘Wall’ application or anywhere else really. We’ll have to go third party to find an app that’s going to let us do exactly this. Thanks to Chris Ridenour and Chris Lamping, we now have the HTML Box application (6,098 users) that essentially allows you to “display text, video, music, pictures and more with minimal HTML knowledge.” [...] I can now potentially earn some ad dollars from Facebook networking, promoting a service I believe in.

P.S. Your Facebook profile traffic will be greater the more groups and networks your involved with.

Even though affiliate marketers are now catching a break on Facebook, you'll notice how Brendan's post scriptcomment about increasing traffic to your profile means that CTRs and conversions are still going to be depend on Facebook's social marketing potential. In other words, marketing on Facebook is still going to be about trust, relationships, and community involvement.

It's for this reason that affiliate marketers are going to have pay closer attention to the rules of social marketing. In fact, they should be particularly interested in what Mitch Joel has termed theFacebook Undertow, which is where users want to connect to another user not only because of who s/he is, but because of who else in that other user's network.

In other words, it's not just who you know, it's also who knows who you know. Affiliate marketers hoping to use Facebook, then, are going to want to position themselves as members of communities that members of their target market might be interested in joining.