8 Reasons to Start Using Facebook for Business Today

That was the headline in an article in the American Chronicle recently. The summary of the story was “The viral and highly informative social network Facebook makes it a perfect marketing tool for many businesses. The top eight benefits of the Web site are detailed in this American Chronicle article, including the site’s high percentage of daily users.”

Facebook is a really hot topic on social network circles so I clicked through to read the article to see what the ideas were. Using Facebook from a business standpoint is relatively new to many marketers and product managers so I was intrigued to see what the 8 reasons were. These were them:

1. The very nature of Facebook is viral.
2. Facebook is the ultimate in social presence marketing.
3. Your target market tells you exactly what it wants, and they’re easy to find.
4. Over half of the people using it, use it daily.
5. Better, stronger online connections.
6. Hard core marketing is out of vogue and declining in effectiveness.
7. Your clients — and your competition’s clients — may already be on Facebook.
8. Facebook friends are willing to continue the conversation.

That was it. The number one reason why you should use Facebook for business is that it is viral! You have to be kidding me. I realize that I am not the average social media user, but I thought that social media was further along the path than this. If this is where mainstream media and business is with social media they have a lot of catching up and understanding to do.

What that means to those of us who actively use social media is that we have a tremendous competitive advantage over most of the people in our industries. If people are just waking up to the idea that social media is viral, it will be months before they decide to do anything viral like video. By then our videos will have gathered thousands of views and comments on YouTube and Metacafe and we will be dominating the search engine results pages for the next 12-18 months.

By the time that our competitors understand that social media can generate a tremendous amount of incoming links and start to think about sites like Digg, we will have built up so many incoming links that they will never catch up.

By the time that our competitors understand that in social networks you can engage in two-way conversations with people in your market, we will already be established as the experts in our field within all the important social networks.

Articles like this from the American Chronicle remind me of what a great window of opportunity that we have. The only questions are whether you will seize this opportunity and how big a competitive advantage you will get before your competitors finally jump in.