Recently, my friend Rob "The Genie" Toth posted an article called "14 Benefits of Facebook Fan Pages".  It fit so perfectly with my recent Facebook postings that I decided to repost it here. Enjoy!

Here are 14 BIG benefits for giving serious
attention to fanpages:

1) Facebook is THE MOST widely accepted social
network. Some of your friends will be on Twitter
or Linked In, or maybe a few out of date types
will still be on MySpace but even most of them also
have a Facebook account. It is by far the largest
web property on the net and certainly the largest,
busiest, fastest growing community.

2) Facebook is the new email. Email was a novelty
at some point. Now everyone has one. Similarly,
500+ mill*ion users are already on facebook.
And it will keep growing. Being on facebook is
becoming a non-negotiable. And having a FAN PAGE
is the most viral way to tap into that community.

3) Your Fan page also doubles as customer support.
It’s easy enough for someone to post a support
issue within your fanpage and the reply you or
your team posts is now available for everyone.

4) Social proof! Sure this actually works against
you when you first launch your fanpage… but
as you grow your audience (fans), a prospect can
see you have 1000, 5000, 20,000+ fans … that’s
built in social proof that indeed others are
paying attention to you and your business.

5) Search results. Go Google “is Google threatened
by Facebook” .. there’s a lot of talk of
increased time spent on facebook and increased
use of it as a search platform. I do the same thing.
I look for service providers by keyword within
facebook… and if I need a service for X and your
fanpage isn’t there, I’m not buying from you.

6) The Facebook Like plugin! Have you seen the
Like (thumbs up) icon? It can be added to your
blogs and pages for immediate exposure to
potentially thousands of users. You see when
someone has a facebook account and clicks the Like
plug-in button from your site, an update is posted
to their wall saying Firstname Lastname Likes “Your
Website Name Here” … but that update is then
published to their home page feed which ALL of
their friends see. So just one “thumbs up” click
could start a snowball of viral growth.

7) Your Fan Page also enjoys viral growth when
a fan mentions you with @_____, or when they
share any of your posts

Email communication. Having a tough time
building an email opt-in list that someone needs
to leave an email+name for?? What if all they
need to do is visit your FanPage, click the “Like”
button at the top and now you can send messages
to all of your fans. So you created a new communication
\channel. Not to mention anytime you post on
your fanpage wall, it will show up for them in
their homepage feed.

9) Traffic… many marketers will make the same
comparisons… a 10,000 Twitter following is
worth LESS than 500 fans on a fanpage. The viral
growth that 500 can give you and the higher
clickthrough rates you get (from a less cluttered
and more meaningful home page feed) makes FanPage
“fans” *MUCH* more valuable than just Twitter followers.

10) Community building: tap into the monster 500
mill community and create your own “Tribe”

11) Local leads gen: though facebook is obviously
international, you’ll find the majority of your
“fans” will be local area users because of how
facebook handles “networks”.

12) Branding: your name gets seen everytime
you (or your staff) leave a post… it publishes
to the “news feed” of your fans. Fantastic
viral exposure.

13) SEO: a backlink to your main site from facebook
ranks you even higher in the engines

14) Analytics: an optimized fan page comes
with a good amount of analytics tools for page
owners. You can really learn a lot about the
interactions and demographics of who is spending
time on your fan page. This bit of “market data”
is VERY valuable if you then apply it to the rest
of your marketing.

Source: Rob "The Genie" Toth's Blog