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Facebook, that ever present social networking site, just turned a whopping six years old this month. Hard to believe such a phenomenon has only been around for such a short period of time. As I type this, my spell checker in Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize it as a real word (and Microsoft is an investor in Facebook!)!

For those of you who don’t ‘get’ Facebook, here’s a layman’s definition:

Facebook is a social networking website where users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college.

Facebook was started by some college kids who wanted a way to communicate and interact with the fellow students. It began at Harvard University in Boston, quickly spread to others schools in the US, and then took off to throughout the rest of the world. And I mean quickly: The success of Facebook is virtually unparalleled in the history of business, at least in terms of the number of users it has.

Here are some quick facts about Facebook:

•  If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world with a population of more 400 million people
• 50% of active Facebook users log on to site in any given day
•  More than 35 million users update their status each day 
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month 
• The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook 
• Facebook pages are available in more than 70 languages
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States Ok, so you get the point – there are a lot of people using this site – and more are joining every day. People all over the world use it to keep in touch with friends and family, share photos and ideas, and entertain themselves. It’s the second most popular web site in the world (after Google) and has replaced email, telephones and other forms of communications. Yes, it can be a big time sink (some companies ban its use in the workplace for exactly that reason), but it’s an incredible way to reach a wide audience.

Which is precisely why as business owner, you need to understand how important Facebook can be. Facebook has emerged as a powerful business tool, not just because of its reach, but also because of its inherent ability to develop and foster relationships between its members – which is at the heart of any successful business: building relationships with your customers.

Facebook has a number of features that can make marketing your business easy, efficient and not very expensive. Next week we’ll talk about the specifics of how you can begin leveraging the power of Facebook as a business marketing tool.

Mike Sottak is the founder of Wired Island, a full service Internet marketing firm based in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He has more than 20 years experience in high technology marketing. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .