When I went in to kiss her goodnight the other night and found my daughter under the covers “friending” Justin Bieber I knew we had a problem. Yeah, she’s addicted, as are most of her friends. My college roommate, my ex , and several friends who claim they are not, are for sure. I’m sorry, but anyone posting 3 or more posts per day on Facebook is officially a Facebook addict and needs to just fess up and either stop living in denial and go with it or join FBA (Facebook Anonymous). But please, do us all a favor and stop saying that you’re not an addict, because we ALL know that you are.

So when I read in yesterdays NY Times

that kids are finding crafty ways to get around the increasing number of Facebook bans their schools are implementing, it came as no surprise, and spoke volumes of the need for small businesses, as much as they want to continue down that road of FB DeNile, to get on board, create a Facebook business page for themselves and begin putting themselves in front of this next generation of Facebook addicts. It even referenced one 8^th grade kid who helped an administrator get around the ban to check her page. Check it out

“One eighth grader, who preferred not to be named, said he coached a school administrator on avoiding the ban last year. “She hated not being able to get on Facebook at work and asked for my help one day in the office,” the boy explained, more than a little sympathetic to her plight. “What could I do?””

Ouch.

Here are 3 good reasons why you need to run, not walk to your computer, or to a professional who can help you get up to speed on Facebook and JUST DO IT. Kids, soon adults, and millions of young and not so young adults are your future audience and they are all there, under their covers when they should be asleep, “friending” Justin Bieber.

1. With over 600 million users and almost 50% of them on Facebook daily….stop….think about it….., AND over 40% of existing businesses already up and running on it, you want your business to be where your customers, and your potential customers are going, right? If you knew that your customers were passing by one of the huge billboards in Times Square every day and those billboards didn’t cost millions per month to be advertising there, you would want to be up there…wouldn’t you?
2. So think of it that way: a Facebook business page is like that billboard except for the fact that it’s free. Your customers are there, their friends are there. And you can say a heck of a lot more on a FB page than you can on a billboard.
3. The search engines love a Facebook Page. Because a business page is a public URL and not a private one, your site will have a much easier time making it to the top of a Google search than your website, unless you’ve invested a lot of $ into SEO (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

As mentioned earlier, your competition already has one, and not because they want to share about their favorite rice and beans recipe. The “like” button has become the new “link”. Many online marketers, myself included now believe that the Facebook “like” button is becoming just as significant as backlinks are to a website. In other words, the more “Likes” your page has, the greater the chance of it ranking high in the search engines for your specific field and keywords. So think of it as a link and encourage your customers to press it. Every time you update something on your page these customers will now see it as they have been “linked” to it.

There are so many good reasons to create one of these pages I could blather on and on about them, but will save that for chapter 2. In the meantime, remember that a Facebook Business page carries good “link juice”, and therefore provides valuable SEO without having to pay for it.

Think about the math. The average Facebook page has 140 friends. When you post to Facebook, your ‘friends’ and all their ‘friends’ will view your post. Can you spell V-I-R-A-L? As insane as it might sound, there’s a reason why Shoprite wants you to “like” them on Facebook.