Social media marketing wouldn’t have ever taken off if it weren’t for Twitter. The ability to listen in on conversations about your brand was a whole new world for marketers, and it still is.

Which is, of course, why Facebook has been going through a “Twitterization” over the last year in hopes that they can copy the idea of a “public realtime Web” and then monetize it.

And they’ve come close to do doing so with their latest push to urge Facebook users to make their posts public. For the work I do monitoring conversations about brands on Facebook, the increase in appearances of those brands (both my own and professional) has been dramatic.

Suddenly, it’s like we’ve discovered an entirely new world, with people buzzing left and right about the brands I manage (even moreso than Twitter).

But it’s still not good enough — in fact, it’s worthless for social media marketers: Facebook still considers anyone who messages strangers more than 5-7 times a day a spammer and will delete that user’s account without even a warning.

This has become torture. You don’t open us up to an entirely new world of customers and potential customers and then hold us back. If you’re going to copy Twitter, you have to copy the very foundation of Twitter — that everything is public and everyone has the right to talk to and follow everyone.

Forcing us to be able to see these conversations, but be limited by how many we can engage with is just silly. If this a setup for a paid product where marketers can gain unlimited access to engaging with users, then it’s understandable (and a damn good product).

Facebook, the message is simple: Think this through before you release such massive updates. You can’t open up the world’s streams and then still restrict us on how much we can participate.

And finally, a word of advice to social media marketers getting in on these conversations showing up in Facebook search results now: Be careful how you craft your messages.

The majority of the customers I’ve reached out to have been OK with my interacting with them, so long as I kept the conversation relevant and nothing at all about paying for a product or talking about an advertisement.

You will, however, come across some who are used to Facebook being simply about friends & family (i.e. people they know). The Wild West of Twitterville doesn’t make sense to them — the idea that everything can be public, so be careful when reaching out to Facebook users; they won’t react kindly if you take them too much by surprise.