I love Facebook - after living abroad for 4 years I have a global network of friends and family that not only benefit from Facebook to keep in touch with what's happening in my life (so much more important now that I have a 1 year old!) but its a way to feel like we are still part of each others lives and not just that voice on the other end of the phone as it was many years ago.

In a business sense, I am seeing more and more clients start to realise the benefit of being on Facebook (I wonder if the movie, The Social Network, has anything to do with it...?) to communicate with their clients and customers. You can have conversations with the very people who use your products and services and start relationships that may prove fruitful for your business in more ways than one.

This excerpt, taken from the HubSpot Facebook Page Marketing e-book, is interesting reading for those who don't understand why some of their posts show up on walls, and some don't:

"Facebook has an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines what actually gets shown to whom. The basic way of looking at that is every single post that you put out on your wall gets a post quality score. If you have a low post quality score, it doesn't make it to very many people.

The fundamental things that influence your post quality scores has to do with the number of interactions you're getting on your post, so how many likes, how many comments, how many shares, and then, of course, the element of time, so how many of those are occurring really close to each other. Is the number of interactions continuing on a post, thereby making it relevant to keep in the newsfeed, and all of those elements.

The key things that people do not interact with are related to self-promotion. If you have a large fan base, you can sometimes even be lured into thinking you're doing a good job if you're getting 500 comments on something. But if you've got over 2 million fans, that's actually a really poor interaction rate.

So what we tell people is that the Wall is really a place for you to build a sense of community with your fans. And it's really a place for your fans to be able to interact with you and for you to be able to interact back with them in non-promotional sort of ways. Then what you want to do in order to reach your fans in any sort of a scalable way is use advertising. You can take out ads that target only your existing fans-the number one reason people become fans is to take advantage of promotional offers."

So, in summary, don't just self-promote your business and your self. Talk to your customers and what's going on in your business, your industry, your world. Have conversations that are meaningful and helpful. Create a community, not a brochure.