I’m on Facebook, you probably are too. What about your organization? Have you taken the time to make a page or group for your brand? Here are five great reason why you should get your organization on Facebook today.

1. It’s where your audience is.

Even without knowing who your organization is or what they do, I am confident that people you are trying to reach are on Facebook. Its way bigger than just college kids, in fact the 25 and older crowd is it’s fasting growing demographic. It is the 4th most trafficked site in the world and the top social media site. It has over 120 million active users, that’s like twice as many people as are in all of France. It’s huge. You’re people are in there.

2. It already has the functionality you want on your website

Organizations will pay large amounts of capital having developers create and maintain applications for their website. Facebook has a host of talented developers doing this for them, for free. And the best news is that Facebook gives those applications to you to use. When you create your page or group you have access to all the great applications in the Facebook system including discussion boards, polls, RSS lists, photos albums, blogs, lists of members and tracking data.

3. It can be a huge bump to your SEO cred

If you want to get your organization’s site to the top of the search results, one factor is to have major websites pointing links back to your site. Facebook is one of the major websites, and when you create your page for your organization, you have the opportunity to include links back to your information or latest news or blog posts. These links just existing have the potential to be a major boost for your site

4. You can send updates en mass

People respond better to a direct message. With Facebook people have the ability to become a fan of your page. Then you have the ability to send updates to each of those fans. The update will go to their Facebook inbox and (in most cases) then directly into their email inbox. It’s a built in email capture and marketing system for you to stay connected with your biggest supporters.

5. Each new fan comes with built in viral marketing

This is a great side effect of someone becoming a fan of your page. Their action of becoming a fan displays on their Facebook mini-feed, so anyone coming to their page will see they are connected to your page. Furthermore, all of that person’s friends will see the action in the primary feed of all their friends that is the default home page for Facebook. This means that every time you get a new fan, they are virally broadcasting it to all their friends, and possibly peaking new interest and developing new fans.

BONUS. It’s free and easy

It costs nothing to join Facebook or to set up a page for your organization. It’s really easy. Setting up a Facebook page for your organization takes only about 10 minutes. Then people can begin becoming fans. Maintaining your Facebook page will still cost no more than your time and probably less than an hour a month.
Do you have a success story about putting your organization on Facebook, please share it in the comments below.