Tons of articles and numerous books have been written about Twitter’s power as a marketing tool for brands, businesses and websites. Now it appears that it’s Facebook’s turn to take the spotlight when it comes to online marketing.

Since its debut in 2004, Facebook has primarily been viewed as a platform for connecting with friends and sharing your personal expressions. However, Facebook has put significant effort into creating a platform where individuals, businesses and organizations can use to promote themselves.

By gaining an understanding of how to use Facebook Pages, you’ll reap the benefits of marketing your business in a whole new way. There are still many businesses who don’t have a Facebook page; typically either the business owners don’t have the time to dedicate to this or they simply feel that Facebook has little to no value to promoting their business.

The fact of the matter is this: Facebook is by far the number one place where people come together to share their thoughts and ideas and experiences they have about a company’s products or services. They come here to seek the advice and opinion of others before making decisions. If this isn’t enough to put you over the edge of adopting Facebook into your marketing strategy, search engine indexing results are now finding that links coming to web pages from Facebook in particular, is now its highest referrer of traffic!

Facebook is being used more and more as the primary front for large-scale social media campaigns and promotions.

So if Twitter has had all the publicity when it comes to brand building and marketing, why is Facebook so effective?

  • There are nearly 900 million Facebook accounts. On any given day, 55% of Facebook’s active users check their Facebook accounts. While Twitter usage is generally restricted to people who are social media savvy, Facebook is used by just about everyone.
  • Facebook is an intimate platform. When your Page updates show up in the News Feeds of your fans, they are appearing alongside the status updates of some of their closest friends. This is a very powerful and intimate place for your content to appear, bringing your brand into your fan’s personal lives.
  • Facebook commands more attention. When people are using Facebook, they are strongly focused on it. Unlike Twitter, which most people keep running in the background while they work on a handful of other tasks.
  • Threaded comments encourage better quality discussion. On Twitter, discussion generally only occurs between Twitter users and their followers. On Facebook, it’s easy for fans to participate in discussion with both Page admins and each other, making it much easier to develop a sense of community among fans of your brand.
  • A Facebook Like is more public than a Twitter follow. When a Facebook user Likes a Page it’s added to their profile for all to see. It becomes a part of their Facebook identity, and because of this, a Like is a powerful gesture. A follow on Twitter, by comparison, is much more hidden.
  • Pages are flexible. Twitter is restricted to a 140-character text update, but Facebook allows you to post photos, videos, links, events and more.

There is a wide range of promotional tools available. Tools such as the “Like Box” and a “Like Button” for your online sites makes very easy to get a steady flow of new Likes and Facebook interaction happening on your Page.

With all these advantages, it’s stunning that there are still so many brands, businesses and websites that don’t have a clue about how to use Facebook for marketing!