Guest blog by Liane Dietrich, managing director of LinkShare

Social networks have been much enthused and debated since their inception. Some of us wonder what we ever did without them, others will never understand what grown people might see in sharing their daily exploits with their ‘network’. However one thing is for sure, nearly every Online Marketing Manager is no doubt still asking themselves the question “how can we make money out of them?”.

Whilst the pure user side of social networks is straight forward, those trying to monetise them face a number of obstacles as they try to strike a balance between enticing consumers with interesting products and offers and avoid bombarding them with irrelevant and untargeted content. In the last 12 months social networks have been gaining some traction, with many companies adding social media interaction to their marketing campaigns. Dell recently announced it made $6.5 million from its presence on social networking sites and Debenhams has experimented with a number of social media tools seeing good success.

But it’s not all been positive - Facebook recently announced it’s dropping banner ads across the site from January as they have failed to work in terms of user experience.

Over the next year I expect a real push by businesses looking to monetise this popular platform, but to succeed in this venture businesses will need to be strategic and targeted to ensure the best ROI. A quick survey of ours back in August ‘09 suggested that more needs to be done to improve consumer interaction on social networks. Marketing campaigns should be tailored dependent on the audience and the type of social network – for example users logging on to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are there to network and not necessarily to shop!

And the future? The true potential is yet to unfold - but I am certainly very excited and positive about the possibilities of this new marketing platform.