FaceBook – for your business yes or no?

As an entrepreneur can you afford to overlook the world’s most visited site? On the surface the obvious answer would be ‘no’. The average Facebook user spends 14 minutes on the site each day. Number of users has now hit 500 million. Those users share everything; filling in some unnameable void. And all that sharing allows Facebook to keep up its steadily escalating ad revenue. Knowing everything about you from your Victoria’s Secret panties purchase, to the Michael Bublé concert that you went to and how many Mai Tai you drank on your Maui vacation. This collected data provides them with a knowledge base that is ripe for targeted ads.

Facebook says that it is about connectedness and openness; so they enhance the experience with the 'like' feature & Open Graph. For big business all this serves as a beneficial appendage to existing ad campaigns. New business is buoyed by a first wave rush of fans or people who ‘like this’. Partially due to all that enthusiastic initial PR work that tends to go with starting a business.

For those in between corporate and new by all means set up a Facebook business page. Plug in the feed from your blog & twitter page; that way the messages efficiently overlap one into another. Answer comments, post announcement and specials. Bottom line though is keep the page low maintenance.

While there are IT and social media visionaries who are shaping our business world I am still not convinced that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg falls into that category or if he is a merely a brilliant opportunist. As one recent article noted when Facebook apologizes it is more about how their actions are interpreted than the action itself.

Right now Facebook is a playground, making the rules up as they go along, so take your business in there, have some fun but keep a close eye on your rate of return for time invested.