Just how much it takes to double your money? It took 8 months to Facebook. NO! We’re not talking about the bucks here, its about the traffic on Facebook. Facebook hit its 100 million user milestone back in August 2008. Can you believe it went from 100 million to 200 million in less than 8 months? When you have hundreds of thousands of users, 100 percent growth in such a short period is impressive. But when you have a hundred million users, it’s nothing short of amazing.

Furthermore, you may remember that Facebook’s (often disputed) $15 billion valuation was forged back then in 2008. Now that their user base has doubled, is the valuation still unreasonably high? Or, perhaps, unreasonably low? Despite the economic recession and the press raving about Facebook being unable to turn a profit, while they’re growing at this rate, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg’s hair will turn gray any time soon.

To celebrate, Facebook has started a charity campaign. Users can go here and share their stories about “how Facebook has helped them give back to their communities, effect change or connect with a distant relative.” They’re working together with 16 charitable and advocacy organizations that have created gifts, available in Facebook’s gift shop. Buy a gift, and 90 to 95 percent of the cost goes back to the organization represented by that gift; Facebook won’t keep any of the money for themselves.

Facebook is quite time-consuing. Perhaps that’s the biggest feature that makes it what it is: A powerful business tool. If used carefully, Facebook has the tendency to move any business ahead of its competition.

As with all social media its greatest benefit is that it allows you to have a greatly extended reach: your profile can potentially expose you to thousands of visitors online. If you do it right and that’s a big if.

FaceBook Demographics

If you’re wondering exactly what is the potential for extended reach, consider that FaceBook has a whopping 175 million users: only 50 million of them are in the US and 9 million in the UK. So if you’re an international outfit, you need applications like FaceBook to make sure you’re getting the potential international coverage you need.

“Yeah, but all you get on FaceBook is kids obsessed with games and music…” Not so! The fastest growing demographic on FaceBook is the 33-40 year-olds, but the over 55s are close behind them. Those are powerful demographics for the business crowd aren’t they?

There are three very important rules you need to follow if you want to be a social media success: I’ll be repeating this later because it doesn’t just apply to FaceBook:

• Never, ever be aggressive or rude. If you wipe someone out on FaceBook chances are it will go viral because everyone loves a fight. But you will put people off doing business with you for good. Always be nice even if you disagree.
• Keep your readers engaged: include interesting stuff for them and…
• Give people something to take away. Nothing creates likeability than solving another person’s problems for them–for free.

You need to spend time connecting with people on FaceBook, and once you’ve done that you need to spend more time engaging with them. If you’re not prepared to do that then perhaps Social Media in all its glory simply isn’t for you.

Engage with your customers on a personal level

One of the hugest advantages of engaging with your customers through social media is that they get to see a side of you that they normally wouldn’t: you become a friend to them and everyone loves to do business with a friend. Successful FaceBook users, or Power Users, find that their business grows virally because they’re giving people what they want or need, so those connections go away and tell other connections to go check it out.

If you ever run into reputation problems online (if, in other words, you have someone publishing unpleasant stuff about you), a strong FaceBook presence can be a wonderful ally in your reputation management strategy. You can also use FaceBook for proactive reputation management. Which is basically making sure that the naysayers can’t get a foot in the door.

So what can you do to make sure that visitors find your FaceBook page engaging and useful?

• Industry news (trade shows, exhibitions, product recalls…you get the idea)
• Tips on using your products/services
• Stories about how your producst/services have helped people
• Stories about your employees and your customers
• Special offers
• You can link to or provide product reviews

One more very important point: you can also advertise directly on FaceBook. With numbers like 175 million and a great demographic you can be sure that your ads will come up in front of the right people. Highly targeted marketing like that is hard to come by.

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