This post is post #2 of the Facebook for Business Series.

Facebook this, Facebook that… You can talk all day about what you can do with this tool, but before getting into the details of how to use the site, we should first establish why to use it.

There are a number of areas where this social networking platform can help your business on and offline. Here are 8 reasons why you should take advantage of them.

Why Facebook Is a Great Way to Unlock your Business Potential

With an effectively crafted Facebook page you can…

• Drive web traffic to your other sites through your Facebook page and generate more leads. Someone who stumbles across your Facebook page may not have found your main site otherwise. It’s important to maximize your web exposure.

• Take advantage of the 150 million users to increase brand awareness, manage your reputation, and engage in word of mouth advertising, Web 2.0. style. Facebook has one of the largest web populations, and the purpose of this site is for people to communicate with each other. Join these conversations to make sure your business is portrayed in the best possible light.

• Engage your customers with promotions, events, contests, and interactive applications. Engaging customers is one of the best ways to spark brand loyalty. Having a variety of activities for your fans to participate in can make their engagement with you skyrocket.

• Understand your customers more effectively based on their comments, response to your updates, and use of your applications. Since Facebook is based in real time, you can get a first hand look at how your customers react to your status updates, marketing initiatives, and more.

• Prove your expertise by sharing relevant articles and news stories with your fans. People frequently will not trust a business unless it has proven that it knows what its talking about. Use Facebook as a tool to exhibit your knowledge of your industry.

• Increase your chances of showing up in search engine results . As search engines increasingly incorporate real-time social media posts into their results (see Google’s Real Time Search for example), sites like Facebook are becoming an integral part of any Search strategy.

• Acquire a better understanding of your audience using Insights. This Facebook tool, which is automatically enabled for your business page, provides demographics of your typical customers (see image below).

Facebook Insights data

Why use Facebook to market your business? The better question is why wouldn’t you use it?