[mkull]

Be careful here, you are talking in absolutes.

If you are b2c you should definitely take a close look at facebook as a part of your marketing strategy. No, not for your friends / family but so you can pay for targeted facebooks ads to show to your potential customers to get them to like your page.

My startup now has over 35,000 'likes' on our facebook page, all in our target demo / market. This is huge. We now have a captive audience we can market to. I would put this just as high as building an email list and consistently marketing to that list.

YES it drives revenue, and more importantly awareness.

[jeremydavid]

I have to agree with you. 35,000 likes are very valuable.

And it's not just the 35,000 people that like you. You can advertise on Facebook to "friends of friends who like you", using the "friend" as a testimonial of sorts. "Blah blah blah - Jeremy Likes This!". This significantly increases conversion rates on the ad, and I would suggest all websites use Facebook pages as part of their marketing strategy.

[silverbax88]

I'm impressed. Can you share how, or what kind of response those likes give you? Do you post updates regularly and see visible results?

[mkull]

We post when we have relevant content, which typically is a mix of new products / sales (we are eCommerce) as well as 'interesting' on topic content (funny videos, blog posts, etc from across the web). We also run contents like 'caption this picture' which are very popular

We see a good amount of likes and comments back and forth amongst the customer base, and as mentioned before it drives traffic to our website as well and keeps our 'brand' top of mind.