Although social sites such as Friendster and MySpace preceded Facebook, we will argue that Facebook is the quintessential social site. The site, which celebrated its eighth anniversary this year, generated nearly $4 billion in revenue last year and currently has over 1 billion active members. As a result of these statistics, it’s foolish for business continue to ignore this free and paid marketing medium and the countless opportunities to engage with customers or potential new customers.

In the past few years Facebook has made the site increasingly business friendly. What started out as informational business pages that fans could like and share with their friends, has now turned into a full-blown advertising enterprise. The site now allows businesses to increase their reach through elements such as wall posts, tags and check-in’s where individuals can post to their wall that they are at or have visited a business.

One application we would suggest our followers to utilize is Facebook’s promoted post application. This tool allows you to push your content beyond just the people who follow your page, for less than the price of lunch. The app allows you to define specific locations, gender and age groups that you would like to target. Fees for this service are based on the number of people who interact with your post.

Another great application that Facebook allows businesses to make use of are events which you can invite followers to. These are great as they can either take the place of an e-blast (which is likely to be deleted) or serve as another platform for sharing. They also allow your fans to share and invite friends to your event for increased reach.

For business owners who have coding knowledge or are developers, Facebook Pages allows for the implementation of customized applications for killer sales pages such as iframes, branded timeline covers and icon, online product sales, surveys, customized tiles that can link to external landing pages, video, and much more. Most of these customized apps are free of charge, to learn more about more about the top 10 apps to build custom pages, click .

Still not convinced Facebook is for your business? Refer back to this number, there are over 1 billion active Facebook users. Most of which are this generation of consumers and the next consumer generation, failing to market to them can lead to closing your doors. Younger consumers are not using traditional mediums to search for businesses or services, they are turning to mobile devices, which accounts for 44 percent Facebook’s monthly traffic, social media, and review sites.