It’s true. Facebook is a marketing, as well as a social media, juggernaut. Despite the naysaying about how social media users won’t want their online interactions interrupted by sales pitches, Facebook Pages and Facebook ads have become essential elements of most marketing plans. Done right, they work, and work well.

And Facebook has only just begun. Over the past twelve months we’ve seen enhancements to Pages and ads that make the platform even more compelling. We’re huge fans (both in the traditional and Facebook sense) and committed users.

But that’s not to say we don’t have a few complaints, particularly with Pages. Herewith, our official Facebook Pages Bitch List, or Six Things We’d Like to See Changed on Facebook Pages.

Page Navigation is buried. Last year, Facebook made changes to Pages that made them more like personal profiles. There were some aspects to those changes we liked (for example, the ability to browse Facebook as the brand). But one change we didn’t enjoy was moving the navigation to the right-hand side, under the pic. And to pour salt on the wound, Facebook eliminated the side bar box.

The result? It’s challenging to promote the third party application tabs where promotions must now live (another change as of May 11, 2011). Users who land on a brand’s Wall can easily miss promotions. Yes, there are things that you can do with the profile picture to call out promotions, but we find that solution awkward, especially if a Page has several apps to promote.

We’d love to see the return of more prominent, and customizable, Page navigation.

The photo strip (usually) looks awful. This point is really about branding on a Facebook Page. We’d appreciate a few more opportunities to brand a Page’s Wall. The photo strip doesn’t provide much opportunity to do that, and it’s impossible to hack it to display a coordinated line-up of pics (the display is now randomized). The use of thumbnails in the strip makes matters worse, as more often than not they look…wrong. And since Facebook also reduced the profile pic size, branding possibilities are further limited.

Please Facebook, allow us to use the profile pic and the space occupied by the photo strip to deliver a coordinated brand message.

No link to brand website. It’s impossible to have a live link to a brand’s website on a Page Wall. No doubt this has something to do with Facebook’s desire to keep traffic inside their walled garden. We’d like one anyway.

You can’t change the landing tab for Fans. If this point were addressed, we probably wouldn’t include the first three items on our Bitch List. It’s impossible to set a default landing tab for Facebook users once they become Fans – they must go to the Wall.  So Fans, the people who are most likely to be interested in your promotions, are the ones most likely to miss them.

No multilingual functionality for Pages. If you do business in more than one language, you have two choices: Bring everyone together on one global Page (and in short order your Page becomes a Tower of Babel). Or set up different Pages by language.

Neither option is perfect. We’d love to see landing page functionality, which allows brands to direct Facebook users to sub-Pages keyed to languages or countries. The Fan count would be global, and the brand gets to market a single Facebook URL.

Marketplace ads. Nothing bothers neophyte Page marketers more than the ads for other companies that appear on their Page. This is not just about competing ads (for example, it’s entirely possible to see a CapitalOne MasterCard ad on the Page of a Visa issuer). It’s also about brand image. For proof of that point, check out the Louis Vuitton Page. I just did, and got ads for something called Tenniscuties.com and an offer of cash for my old air conditioner. Not exactly befitting the LVMH brand.  We’d like to see the ability to squelch these ads added to Page functionality.

Which brings us to the reasonable point that Facebook makes Pages (and access to millions of Facebook users) available for FREE to brands, so quit whining.  To that we say we wouldn’t mind if Facebook charged a modest monthly fee for Pages with premium features like these. The fee could be tied to a Page’s Fan count. We bet it would generate boatloads of revenue for Facebook.

And given Facebook’s astronomical private market cap, every hundred million or so of incremental revenue has got to matter.