No matter what service or product your website provides, you need to reach out to your target audience and make contact. Social media is that tool. Although the nature of something like Facebook largely depends on the company managing it, social networking falls somewhere in-between the “contact us” form and the media relations people; it’s the piece that can act as the “human element” of your company.

Once you have a Facebook fan page established for your website, put a link to it on all of your relevant material like press releases, news kits, announcements and sales. Promote your website through your social networking, and your social network through your website. You can also reach out and post unique content for your Facebook site, and devote some time to connecting with your audience on Facebook—answering questions, responding to positive feedback, and other, minor customer-service related tasks.

Ideally, you will have a search engine optimization or marketing person keeping an eye on the content that goes in and out of the blog, and keeps it from turning into yet another site to dump links into. The beauty of Facebook, until another, bigger social media network takes over, is how people use it to interact with each other. Worldwide, there are more than 200 million users on this network. If you can even get 1% of them interacting with your company on a regular basis then you’ve succeeded in perfecting your social media strategy, and most likely, your search engine marketing tactics.

Although Facebook does not directly lead to profits, it is part of the campaign that creates brand awareness, and it is a fairly easy (and relatively cheap) way to go about getting attention from a highly-connected audience.