If you asked me 6 months ago if Facebook was a good channel for B2B marketers I would have told you “Go to LinkedIn. That’s where business networking takes place.”

Now it’s less about “one or the other”.

B2B marketers used to embrace professional channels like LinkedIn, Blogs and other professional discussion forums to find their prospects. If you queried most B2B marketers about whether or not they were engaging those prospects within Facebook the typical response was something along the lines of “Facebook is more for entertainment, like MySpace”

There are some excellent reasons why B2B marketers should begin turning to Facebook for networking and lead generation. Consider these points:

1) Overall Growth and Population

Facebook is pushing over 400 million users and has more than doubled in size in a short span of time – little more than a year. With those kinds of numbers it’s extremely likely that your targeted prospects are participating within this social network. With the way we’re sharing content on the web, such as with the new “Like” button that Facebook is allowing other sites to place within their content, the line between personal and professional is slowly being erased on social networks.

Couple that with the fact that while business is business, those businesses are still run by people and those people are on Facebook. Even in the B2B marketing world, there is a lot to be gained by appealing to the person making the decisions. Surpise – those people you want to appeal to are on Facebook.

The service will continue to grow as well, expected to break 500 million users by mid-2010. While Facebook might not be the one-stop shop for B2B marketing, it stands to reason that with the sheer number of users involved in the social network that some contacts will be made and business deals will blossom. You’re crazy to think otherwise.

2) Discussions Are Easily Accessible

When you work through LinkedIn and you’re looking for discussions, you often need to dig into the meat of separate pages and sort through industry and brand specific groups in order to find the discussions.

On Twitter, another social network that is gaining popularity, a stream can become so thick with content based on the number of followers that it’s difficult to keep up on conversations. Filing people into lists can help alleviate some of the strain of locating and keeping up with discussions but then a B2B marketer is left with picking through lists to track multiple discussions. Often, contacts from individuals can get lost rather quickly.

The Facebook Wall puts conversations among networked individuals up front and center. While it may not be the page that someone immediately lands on for a branded business page on Facebook, it’s only a click away to access the wall posts and discussion threads that some might start.

The bonus to “owning” the Facebook page without much fear of mediation is that you can talk up your own business to share interesting content, promos etc with those you’re networking with. Self-promotion is highly shunned on other networks like LinkedIn and even Twitter. The ability to have vastly open discussions with the added benefit of content marketing within the platform are some of the most prominent features that are drawing B2B marketers toward Facebook more and more each day.

3) SEO Value

B2B marketers are discovering the SEO value in profile pages both personal and professionally. Major networks like Twitter and Facebook are highly trusted by search engines hold a high page rank. While you’re not likely to get any DoFollow goodness out of these sites, optimized brand pages on Facebook for a business can offer benefits for increasing leads within the organic search results.

As the search engines index relevant keywords within and links within the site (particularly within the company description and other parts of the Facebook profile) users who enter those keyterms as queries may find your site within the SERPs. Including your Facebook fanpage as part of your linkbuilding strategy can help increase the rank for that page and improve visibility to other B2B marketers.

Facebook may seem like it is strongly based in the B2C market, but the truth it’s not limited to any specific market at all. If we avoid the position of trying to sell directly to a business and focus on the fact that we’re selling to people within those businesses than any network with a massive social following is a viable harvesting ground for B2B marketing.

A Facebook page can provide a visitor of any type with a different (but highly valuable) perspective of a business within their area of interest beyond the jargon of a static corporate website.

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