The next frontier that Facebook needs to conquer is search. That would help it significantly expand revenues and, in turn, its market value. Search, I would say, is a very high priority for Facebook and may be the announcement due Tuesday might well be that. Facebook has this incredible treasure trove of unstructured data on the site, but can it finally put it to good use?

Research firm eMarketer estimates that Facebook, the No. 2 company in the U.S. mobile advertising market, had an 8.8 percent share last year —up from zero in 2011. That compared with No. 1 Google’s 56.6 percent. This year, Facebook is expected to grow its share to 12.2 percent, while remaining far behind Google, but we all know the real dollars is in search.

Facebook’ biggest challenge however and potentially its most lucrative opportunity, a chance to topple Google as the king of search. Will that ever happen?

There’s always some sort of change in the way that search is handled, whether it’s Bing changing the way they handle images, Google with changing their total displayed results from 10 to 7 and continually testing different methods. Even tablets and mobile devices have their own unique way of handling searches and results, and Apple is no exception.

What Apple is doing however, is completely unique in the search world, mobile or otherwise. Bing displays ten results on a page and Google users sometimes see only seven results on a page, and Apple has decided to go with a single search result per page. It’s a strange move for any search provider to use only a single result per search, and puts a hurt on the mobile display market for the iOS 6 system. It’s just another new feature I’m guessing of the iOS 6 upgrade, to go along with their own version of the maps feature. Probably a good thing that Google is already posting their own map app on their store, maybe there will be an alternative for their search display soon.

And with the end of the week we’ve almost entirely completed moving the site to a new look and platform, hopefully you haven’t noticed the hiccups too much. We’ve made the move to an updated look and feel in order to bring the looks of the blog and the website together, and overall change is a good thing. Or as can be sometimes overheard when Sergei Brin is talking about the Google Glass project:

You either continue to evolve or you go extinct

With your online branding and optimization strategies working at full steam, there’s even another metric which needs to be considered. It’s the realm of internet usage that’s so large, it has nearly double the install base that computers have. It’s also one of the most fastest growing methods to access the internet for product searches to purchases. So that begs the question, did you remember to factor in mobile optimization when you developed your strategies?

If you’ve forgotten to take this form of access in mind when building your site and strategies, there is no need to fret, you can still work your way into the results. Because it’s one of the fastest growing access methods around, it’s also one of the least explored where brands and branding are concerned. So what are some of the points to consider when you focus on your online branding going mobile? Well, your audience is using a phone, at most a tablet of some sort, and they don’t have the ability to long tail search easily. So their searches are going to be skewed towards the shorter term searches and especially towards local venues. They won’t be searching on Amazon for an item they’re wanting to pick up in the same day, so you need to ensure that your site is optimized for local searches as well.

The social angle, using reviews and capitalizing on trends are strong factors to bear in mind when your site is setup for mobile search. Knowing that your major brand is sponsoring a give away or a sale can be key to driving foor traffic through your door, easily facilitated by using your Facebook page or Twitter account. Make sure that your pages are designed to be viewable on a mobile device. There are hundresd of millions of users out there using phones and tablets to use the internet, but not all of them can display the web the same as a desktop pc can. You need to make sure that your pages are quick loading, and can fit on the displays of the mobile devices out there. It’s only a handful of tips to get your brand started on the mobile front, but it will get the ball rolling and the customers coming.