On Wednesday of last week Facebook announced their partnership with Omniture, a leading provider of online business optimization software, which will help the world’s largest social network provide solutions to optimize Facebook as an online marketing channel. Although the Adobe owned company has been active on Facebook for the past year until now there has been no official partnership between the two.

According to the MediaPost article, “Omniture and Facebook Ink Deal to Bring Analytics and Buying Tools to Social Marketing”, the alliance will initially focus on automating Facebook media buying and giving brands access to analytics that measure customer engagement. The partnership will build upon the analytic features the two companies announced last year helping brands easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in order to better communicate with the sites more than 400 million users. This is big news for US marketers as Facebook recently surpassed Yahoo for the number two site in the US behind Google with 133 million viewers.

The toolset developed by Omniture will allow companies to better optimize the impact and ROI of their Facebook investments, while marketers will be able to incorporate Facebook initiatives as part of their overall multi-channel marketing strategy. This will become increasingly important as companies try to move beyond interrupting the online consumer experience and find ways to converse and have more relevant interactions with their customers.

Omniture clients have already been utilizing both services to build their brands and increase customer loyalty, so this partnership looks to be a natural progression, which will help marketers engage interested customers on Facebook and increase revenue. Both Omniture and Facebook say they plan to expand the partnership going forward as opportunities become available. And even though the partnership was announced this week don’t expect to see the analytic and marketing toolset from Omniture until later this year.