Facebook has become a cultural phenomenon and has the power to effectively boost your business in a cost-effective manner.

Facebook is arguably the most popular social networking site right now. It has a variety of applications that allow users to customize their profiles and uses of the site. For businesses, Facebook is a great way to do some free advertising and networking. By setting up a profile for your company or a fan page, you can invite customers, employees and other business acquaintances to join you. When others start to friend you, their contacts will see select information about your company and the fact that the person is interested in your firm. This often creates interest in others, so they want to learn more and they become a friend also.

By planning special Facebook events, you can build interest in your company and contact a wide variety of possible clients. Getting the word out about your event is not very difficult since the users who participate in it will post information on the event straight to their live news feed. This is sure to arouse interest in other users as well. Large scale invites may be better for some events, such as webinars. You can send your invitation to all your fans and friends so that they can forward it to others.

One of the most useful things you can do with Facebook is to encourage your customers to leave a testimonial on your fan site. By having real testimonials, your business will appear much stronger than one without testimonials. It will also impact potential customers much more greatly than a company without them. Once you have a good selection of convincing testimonials, increase your fan base by offering incentives for new companies to join your page.

Some of Facebook’s marketing tools are fee based. These are designed for users who want to contact a large number of people as soon as possible. You will not be charged, however, for the majority of the tools you need to develop a powerful marketing strategy with Facebook. If your company cannot afford to spend much on marketing, a fan page is a good launch pad for your efforts.

Find other businesses in need of your goods and services with Facebook marketing. By getting your B2B information out there for people to discover, you will increase sales, get more repeat business, get more referrals and get higher traffic volume on your website that you can then turn into new sales for your bottom line.

Ray Perry is an Internet marketing executive with more than 25 years of experience. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at MarketBlazer, a small business marketing company and authorized Duct Tape Marketing coach. You can get more information about Facebook marketing at www.MarketBlazer.com