Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Ad-Tech NY attendees a sneak peak at the rapidly growing social network’s new advertising platform as he unveiled it in Midtown Manhattan yesterday.

In order to offer a range of options for different types of advertisers, there are three unique Facebook Ad formats.

Facebook Pages is designed for businesses wanting to create a commercial Facebook profile page. These pages will have all the functionality of personal pages. Visitors can sign up as supporters or friends of the business and send messages of support that appear on the news-feeds of everyone associated with that business. Videos, reviews, audio files, flash content and other application formats will be supported as they are on traditional personal pages. Commercial Facebook Pages will be free to build and are ment to act as advertising platforms for the two other ad-formats Facebook offers.

Facebook Social Ads are smaller, targeted advertisements designed to “… allow your business to become part of people’s daily conversations.” Social ads will be displayed to users who have recently visited particular Facebook pages or off-network websites using widgets or gadgets from the third advertising format called Facebook Beacon. The ads will appear in a left-side ad space on Facebook pages and also in the news-feed of engaged users as attachments to relevant stories or events. (eg: a friend becomes a fan of a movie that has a Social Ad campaign)

Social Ads are sold based on the number of clicks (CPC) or number of impressions (CPM). Analytic metrics will be provided by Facebook Insights, a free service that runs with all Facebook pages and Social Ads.

The third advertising format announced yesterday is called Facebook Beacon. Designed around a series of gadgets, Beacon allows websites to inform relevant Facebook pages and users about changes, visits and updates to that website. Actions taken by site visitors can be automatically updated on corresponding Facebook Pages and through the news-feeds of users engaged with that website, thus incorporating those actions in a much wider range of Facebook conversations. To make it as simple as possible, sign-up for Facebook Beacon is free and installation consists of adding three lines to your website’s source-code.

For Internet marketers Facebook represents a wide range of uniquely targeted eyeballs, today’s ultimate innovation in “narrowcasting”. There are two aspects to Facebook that make it appear to be a tremendous marketing venue. First, the sheer volume of personal information provided by Facebook’s rapidly growing network of users gives marketers specific data that goes beyond complex demographics. Secondly, Facebook is the most complete and comprehensive social network operating. Friends lists resemble enormous spider-webs where each connection marks opportunity and expansion for ad-delivery. In short Facebook is the greatest ongoing networking session ever and one is hard-pressed to find a marketer who doesn’t live for good networking sessions.

Some online marketers however are not buying the hype, not immediately anyway. Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land wrote that he finds, “… much of what now goes on at Facebook (via the apps and their adoption) qualifies as a kind of spam, even though it is pushed via my network.” He does note that, “Clearly not all people share this view”, but suggests, “… in my opinion, while Facebook Ads may make the site engaging and safe for brand marketers, it may start to become much less so for regular people.”

Over at Traffick.com, Andrew Goodman outlines a few of his perceptions about advertising in Facebook noting, “The more Facebook becomes like a platform – a starting point or an organizing principle – the more it becomes like your desktop. You don’t want ads on your desktop.”

In his post Andrew links to a blog post by Seth Godin, “Facebook’s Hotmail problem“. Seth recalls how Hotmail came out of nowhere to capture a huge number of freemail users, was bought by Microsoft for $400 million cash and then languished without a profitable, user-accepted revenue model.

“When someone goes to FaceBook, they’re not looking for stuff. They’re looking for people. But people don’t buy ads, stuff does.

That’s a problem.

Any platform that makes ads a distraction or a cost is always going to fail compared to a site where the ads are a welcome part of the deal.”

Issues of acceptance aside, Facebook’s new advertising system should be of great interest to search and Internet marketers, if only because it appears to be a viable alternative venue for paid marketing campaigns.

SEOs in particular should note how Facebook profiles have opened to allow access from search engine spiders.

For the coming months Facebook Advertising is sure to be a hot-topic in the industry.