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.

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.

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.

I find it amusing that the comments are more readable than the article itself.

I've found that it's not all that effective when I'm promoting content that my readers get through my e-mails, RSS, or website, but it's actually really great when I'm promoting a sponsor (I'm in the employment space). I can usually send some extra clicks to my sponsor, and that makes the campaign look better.

There's two (combined) reasons for that:

1. It's really hard to acquire users. With or without budget, the most important part of a startups success is the ability to find and get onboard new users/customers. Facebook might only be one method of getting people sign up for your service but hey, it's one of the most effective ones. If 200 people click "Like" on the same day, of course it will go viral if it's a cool startup. Friends or not, it 's people and most of them have great networks of other people around them. People with many friends are more likely to succeed not only with your Facebook Page but with the business itself. Guess why? People know people, even if they're not themselves in the right target group. Get many people like you, and they'll like what you're doing (and their friends to, hint).

It's no rocket science, really. Facebook is very effective for marketing. Use it. Tips: start the page as fast as you can. Growing the amount of fans takes time, with many invited friends or not. If you get pre-launch press, use it for something. To have 200 FB fans when you launch for real are very valuable.

2. Retention. Facebook is great as a reminder to people. If you have many FB fans, you have many people to remind about your startups existence. Facebook is useful for getting long-time value of a initial interest/hype/launch. Actually more effective than newsletter subscriptions for some of the projects I'm involved in.

If you're more of a general consumer product, you should be on facebook, but not on a fan page, you should be trying to get users to "Share" your content.

Fan Pages can be a good way to communicate with existing customers or blog visitors, but it's not really an acquisition mechanism.

Sure it is. We have 1000 fans on Facebook, and basically none of them have converted to our paid service yet. It's people who came to our site and hit "Like". Many of them don't even use our free service. Status updates we post there can absolutely convert users.

And when those users like an item in our feed, or comment on it, that potentially goes into their feed, which is outreach to their friends (i.e. new customers).

Based on my experience with B2B, you don't even need a website.