If you’ve read Tali Shapiro’s recent post on “Facebook - The Bottomless Pit of Social Activity” you might have had similar reactions as I did. There are certainly some valid points about Facebook in regards to being a bosses worst nightmare. I read once in a newspaper that some people are now so addicted to Facebook that they even schedule work around Facebook, allowing up to 8 time slots for Facebook time. This cost many companies thousands maybe even millions of dollars if all their employees are wrapped into this social network. However, for many internet marketers, I believe this is the perfect avenue for more exposure.

Using Applications and Plugins to Promote
Facebook is ideally a place for all friends, family, acquaintances and associates to keep in touch as well as network. The majority are there for fun and wouldn’t be in any mood to buy products or services. Not the best place for sales conversion but that’s no different to all the other social networks (although I think MySpace isn’t doing too bad with bands and musicians). What Facebook allow marketers to do is give back to their community in the forms of plugins and applications, an entertainment factor that shows a lighter personality of their “corporate activities”. No one likes to be hard sold or pressured into buying things which is why social networks like Facebook are so important to help relate to people better.

Creating an application will cost money but it’ll certainly be worth the effort if it works. Similar to link baiting (except your not getting links), the idea of the application or plugin should be interesting so that it gets maximum distribution through people’s friends.

Creating Groups
This is a great way to find people with similar interests. Your friends and family might not have the same interests as you so why not scout for those who do share the same commonalities. In a sense, you could call this “targeted traffic”, but more so in my opinion , it is a way to network globally. In the case of search engine market, I’ve created my own group called “SEM link exchanges” where webmasters can discuss potential partnerships with others. It can still be fun and games within the group but obviously the title of a group will define what people should be discussing within that network. Learn off others, teach others, share news, post articles…in the end the trust people have in each other will sell better than any sales letter, banner, adwords or anything else. That is, if you had selling a product in mind.

Brand Yourself
There are some personal details that people are uncomfortable revealing and by all means hide some of it. Your colleagues dont have to know everything. Facebook is just another avenue to make your name well known in your industry whether its for the benefit of your company or yourself, your name has more value if you in turn are giving value to others.

RSS Feeds
You can now have RSS feeds in facebook and if you have done the previous aspects correctly, there’s no reason why people wouldn’t read your feeds.

No disrespect to Tali’s thoughts on Facebook as I think everyone is entitles to their own opinions with various social networks. But it is hard to disregard the rapid growth of Facebook and as search engine marketers we need to learn how to overcome these hurdles. Yes, people go to facebook for fun. Yes, people are wasting time at work super poking each other. And yes, your not going to have much luck selling products through facebook. However, after reading some blogs such as Lara Saad’s - i-make-money-on-facebook.com, you can not neglect the fact that there is huge potential with Facebook. I’ll leave you with this trend that I recently found through Sphinn: