10 reasons to use Facebook for business

Social networking websites, especially Facebook, have significant implications for business owners, vendors, and entrepreneurs. To keep your business current, you should at least be familiar with the latest conversational marketing techniques and viral technologies, including Facebook and its variety of powerful features.

Here are ten reasons to be active on Facebook:

1. Get to know your peers. Facebook isn’t just for college kids anymore. Members are usually older and more mature than on other sites, and there are more white-collar users.
2. Find business contacts. With over 100 million active users, and projected to be 500 million by 2011, it’s not just your Facebook friends, but your prospects, your clients, your JV partners…and of course, your competitors. You have to be turned on too.
3. instant gate opener. Facebook members are open to connecting. You can easily start a dialogue with very successful people, even famous ones, who were unattainable before.
4. Build relationships. By engaging in conversations with your prospects and customers, you can better tailor your marketing and business services to meet their needs.
5. increase visibility. By consistently showing up, posting relevant information, and being a thought leader, you can increase visibility and credibility as an expert in your area.
6. Develop your personal brand. The lines between business and personal have become blurred. You can reveal as much or as little about yourself as you want, allowing you to personalize your brand.
7. Target your niche. Users offer vast amounts of information about themselves that you can easily access. This type of demographic, psychographic, and technographic data would previously have cost a fortune to access. The author, John Battelle, calls Facebook an “intent database.”
8. Get fast top placement on Google. Create a page for your business and “send” information to your “fans”. Pages (for companies) and profiles (for individuals) are indexed for optimal search engine ranking. Facebook has a page rank of #5 according to Alexa.
9. Place targeted ads. With Facebook Social Ads, you can try extremely targeted advertising for minimal cost.
10. free market. Other than paid ads, Facebook is completely free to use and with regular activity you will end up with more traffic, more subscribers and more paying customers.