The buzz around Facebook, Twitter, and social media has turned into a roar over the past year, creating both opportunity and anxiety for countless small businesses.

Almost anyone in marketing will tell you it's critical to make use of Facebook and Twitter—and maybe LinkedIn and MySpace, too. There are 200 million Facebook users and 20 million on Twitter—so the numbers are just too big to ignore. That's especially true if you're in the media business, like NewWest.net, but it applies to most places. To get your message out, you have to find the people.

Yet the nature of these networks poses huge challenges for marketing. Facebook and Twitter were designed for socializing, not selling, and those activities don't tend to gel.

On Facebook, you can now have a company (or "organization") page, which has different characteristics than a regular personal page. Instead of becoming your "friend," people join as a "fan" of your company, and you can't access the same set of personal info.

This makes sense, but it also underscores an inherent disconnect. Most people do not think of themselves as "fans" of particular businesses, even businesses they like. (Fan after all is short for fanatic, and it's a pretty rare firm that inspires fanaticism.) So it's not that easy to accumulate fans.

Some places get around this by using a personal page as a company page, but Facebook is cracking down on this practice. If you're doing it, be careful, as you could one day find your account (and all your hard-won friends) deleted.