11 Reasons Why Facebook Rocks - For You or Your Business

Facebook, at its most basic level, is what it sounds like.

In the olden days before the Internet, when I was just a wee girl, a facebook was a book with photographs in it, meant to help people on campus get to know each other, from alumni and staff to students and teaching faculty. If you know someone on Facebook, that's reason enough to join.

Yes, like AOL was, it is somewhat of a "walled garden", meaning it's a partially closed network where the general public can't see what you're up to in certain parts unless they're also members.

Sometimes, privacy is a good thing, yes?

People present a different side to themselves when the doors are closed, when they can control who is observing what they do.

And this is what is wonderful about Facebook. You get to know people on a more personal level than you would with email, people who you might not otherwise meet in person, though certainly Facebook interactions can spark in-person networking. In the meantime, you can learn what their interest are from their profiles, and find good places to start small talk. You can also observe how they interact, which may help you decide if you want to go any further.

I'll get into more details about the tools in Facebook that actually make this possible later. Right now, here's a quick list of what makes Facebook the place to be right now.

You can be yourself more, and still be professional. There are things you may share on Facebook, like family photos, that aren't exactly risque, but that you wouldn't put on your blog, either, due to audience conflicts or content compatibility issues.

It's easier and faster to get to know people you admire. There are many people whose content I enjoy, that I'd like to get to know better, in a deeper way than commenting on their blog would allow. However, I've longed for a way that is not as intrusive as random emailing or calling them on the phone out of the blue.

Facebook allows me to find and talk to those people, and soak up a whole different batch of their wisdom than the public at large gets to see.

So if you find out that someone you admire is on Facebook and they aren't yet overwhelmed with noise, get on and Friend them before their list goes over 250 - that seems to be the point at which the noise has the potential to overwhelm the signal.

If you aren't able to do that, there's always joining their fan page, which can satisfy your fix for new information about your favorite public figure, and still have a chance to have one on one interaction with them.

It helps you establish common ground to facilitate deeper bonds when networking. You have a lot more leverage to introduce yourself to someone if you participated in several of the same discussions and are interested in the same things. With a blog you have a fleeting connect until someone comments repeatedly.

I mean, honestly, how many blogs do you visit every single day, of the ones that are in your reader?

Facebook has a system that reminds me to care for and feed my relationships with people in a way that a blog doesn't - and if that wasn't enough, the Notes application is also a great help in reminding me when people I'm connected to have published new blog posts! When you bump into someone enough within this remnder system, you'll want a way to connect to each other more often.

It's intimate. This point can't be overstated. Facebook feels like a bunch of small gatherings, even when there's a conversation in a big group taking place among hundreds of people.

This makes people feel comfortable.

When they're comfortable they relax.

When they relax, they're more open.

Meeting colleagues, potential clients and your favorite experts is a completely different experience than when you meet them in a more public part of the Net - for better or for worse, you'll often get the most accurate version of a person you can online.

Facebook friends are more likely to help spread your content. In my first few weeks on Facebook I was included in the famous technology blogger Robert Scoble's linkblog, which led to getting on the first page of Sphinn, another social networking site.

Each of these incidents sent me far more traffic than regular expertise marketing alone.

I didn't even know that someone like Scoble even read my content, we're really only Facebook and Twitter friends, it's not like I know the guy, though Facebook makes it feel like I do. And yet, I wonder how much exposure I would have gotten from him if I hadn't been frequenting the same spots as him at the time.

I also have had more of my other content either replied to or submitted to social news sites by people not on my team than in just about any other community I've ever particpated in.

You can display your expertise instead of just talking about it. It's one thing to get compliments by peers, or to be published in a prestigous online publication because of somethng you wrote - in fact, it's a great thing. A wonderful enhancement to that is when a potential client sees you edified by one of your peers. It's extremely powerful, because it happens in real time.

Many of the activities you flit around the Web doing can be accessed from within Facebook, which can help organize and simplify your day. I can Twitter, Jaiku, share blog posts I like, and do a LOT of other social media related things that are imperative to my business from within Facebook.

Of course, I don't need to have Facebook to do this. It just makes it easier and more fun.

So what happens to me when Facebook is down? The same thing that happens to me when Google is down. I don't rely on Google for ALL my traffic, and in the same way I don't rely on Facebook for access to my friends, social networking, etc. The part of the online world that gets pulled into Facebook is still retained on the outside of the garden - ie, I can still Twitter from the Twitter page if I like.

Facebook brings you 175 million potential people for you to market to - Without Necessarily Actively Marketing to Them.

Facebook is not a place to spam your link and people who do are mostly ignored, often banned, and occasionally chastized. Yet, even though I have not done one single thing to market myself on Facebook, I've got a whole new audience stream from it.

No, really.

Besides doing the best three things that can get people from my Facebook profile to my web page, I have done zero marketing on Facebook - and yes, there are ways to market on Facebook besides networking (like the recent change in Facebook pages), I just haven't used any of them.

And yet I get constant targeted leads from it.

It feels like a fun waste of time but it can actually double as highly productive time spent on your online business. I know I don't have to explain to you why feeling like you're goofing off, when you're growing your business, is a good thing.

The additional stream of visitors I get to my blog from Facebook is more interactive.

Two years ago, with only 52 friends and one network able to see my full profile - the people who come here from there were more likely to reply to posts, and they leave deep conversational responses. Makes sense when you think about it - traffic from a more interactive community is more likely to... um... interact.

Now, with over 3600 friends and a lot more noise in my signal, plus the fact that I post to my blog a lot less, I'm still getting a great response when I do produce content, though much of it is decentralized from my own site.

You'll find all kinds of long lost friends, contacts and business associates. There are people I haven't heard from, literally since college, that I found again through Facebook. It made my eyes mist up to see some of them around again, and doing well. That's the best present I could ever get from being online and it was totally free. :)

Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team!