• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 9, 2010

Now that Facebook has a real-time search engine pulling in data on its 500 million members through an API built by the social network, brands will soon have an opportunity to target ads based on search terms and keywords in status updates, something Facebook execs claimed the social site would never do. Think of it as a treasure hunt for new customers.

On Monday, RTS engine Wowd released a free software client, but Mark Drummond, the company's chief executive officer, says the company's roadmap offers much more.

In theory his plan sounds perfect. Advertisers having the ability to target Facebook members through the Social tab in the client would bid on keywords, tying the paid search ads to status updates and search terms. Wowd also would insert ads into the conversation as sponsorships, similar to Digg's approach.

The problems Wowd faces remain fundamental to marketing. Let's begin with the most important: traffic.

Facebook is the second most popular site in the world, according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. The site has been online since 1997. The time spent in a typical visit to the site is roughly 32 minutes, with 31 seconds spent on each pageview. Visitors to the site view an average of 14.2 unique pages per day.

Inside Facebook provides a detailed look at the numbers released last week. The site estimates 42.1% penetration in terms of total population; among large countries, only the United Kingdom is higher.

And while Facebook has managed to generate traffic among its 500 million members, Wowd needs Facebook members to download the software client and use it.

Advertisers don't want to buy ads on a site with nonexistent traffic. Many times loyal consumers go kicking and screaming before they change brands.

Changing consumer habit isn't easy. It hasn't been easy for Microsoft to change the habit of millions of people who "Google" searches rather than "Bing" them. Though not easy, brands can persuade consumers to switch.

Bing has gained slow steady growth in the United States. In the past year, Bing's market share rose 4.7 percentage points in the U.S. since launching June 2009 to 12.7% of U.S. searches, according to comScore.

Combining search traffic of Bing and Yahoo Search will give the two approximately 30% market share. In June, Americans conducted 16.4 billion core searches, up 3% sequentially.

There there's competition. David Szetela, Clix Marketing founder. says Wowd has a lot of competition from social media apps like TweetDeck, as well as apps from the social media site applications like Facebook's and Twitter's iPhone apps. The RT search engine either needs to gain market share by "spending heavily" or "go crazily, viral quickly."

No one denies it's an interesting concept. Ads targeted to users based on their Facebook interests and status updates can become even more specific and reliable, Szetela says. But Wowd needs to rely on wide distribution of a client app to build the ad audience base, and this will present an uphill battle.

Loyal customers will follow and talk about brands through a variety of social sites and mediums. In fact, 46% of consumers ages 15 to 24 engage with brands via email and on Facebook and/or Twitter. Only 2% isolate their engagement with brands to social networks alone, according to a report from ExactTarget and coTweet.

The findings suggest 14% of thoe who participated in the survey say they won't engage with brands online through any of the three channels, and 38% will only engage brands through email.