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Facebook just this week reached an incredible 5 hundred million members establishing itself once again as the largest social media website in the world. It is not only the media that has turned their focus towards Facebook in recent times however because where there is large amounts of people online there are internet marketers looking for ways to tap into them for marketing purposes. 

In this article today I am going to reveal one of the most popular methods for internet marketers to exploit Facebook’s mass of traffic.
I first found out about Facebook fan pages use for marketing when I was searching through my Facebook newsletter one day online. A humorous fan page title really caught my eye so I decided that I would click through out of curiosity. The fan page to my surprise had gained over 100,000 fans in just 24 hours. Almost in disbelief I refreshed the fan page and watched the fan count shoot up, hundreds of fans were joining every second. Over the coming 5 days I witnessed the Facebook fan page reach 1 million members which proved to me that viral marketing was the most powerful marketing available online today and Facebook easily was the most viral platform online.

Facebook fan pages have been available for Facebook users for a very long time however many have not truly understood the power they have and the influence which can be gained by using them correctly. In order to fully understand the power that a Facebook can have for your business it is important that we dove into the mechanics of how Facebook works.

When a member signs up for a Facebook account they are essentially handed their own profile page and network. Their network is the friends and family which they choose to connect with their account. Everyone has their own unique profile page and their own unique network. A network is extended when two members agree to become friends. An individual member’s network activity can be viewed in the Facebook members “News Feed”. This news feeds size is determined by the amount of friends a member has and how much activity is taking place between those friends’ profiles.
When a member on Facebook joins a specific Fan page on Facebook not only does it get posted on their members profile, the activity also gets posted on their friends news feeds. This notification to all of their friends that they have joined this fan page means that all of their friends now get exposed to the fan page and can also join. When this effect occurs on a large and fast scale a Facebook fan page can go into what we would as internet marketers would call “Viral Mode” giving the owner of that fan page exposure to a large amount of fans.

The power of this for a fan page owner or Admin is that when a Facebook member joins a fan page they aren’t just notifying their friends via Facebook’s news feed systems but they are also subscribing to any comments the fan page owner makes or any links that the owner of the fan page posts. The real benefit of this is the fan page owners can gain exposure to hundreds of thousands of member news feeds within a very short period of time giving them the ability to promote their business to a large active online crowd.