Maddie at Socialfish pointed me to some social networking stats that Nielsen posted recently. The two charts showcase growth of social media sites from September 2007 to September 2008. You can see which are growing the fastest and which are simply the largest in terms of audience. I’m not surprised to see Facebook (FB) sixth on the list of fastest growing but also second on the list of sheer size. What a great place to be! And by that I mean both what a great place to be for FB, but also FB is a great place to be for you and your organization.

Not only does FB have a huge and growing audience but the company also has a great FREE offering to support organizations. They’re called FB Pages, with a capital P. This is not a post about what FB is or how to use it, so I’ll just jump right to what a FB Page can do. It’s like giving your organization the same presence on FB that any person would have. So step one, you can connect with friends which is the basis of FB functionality. In the case of a FB Page, they would be “fans” of your organization instead of “friends”, but the purpose is the same. Step two, here are some things you can do with your FB Page:

• Grow a fan base. When a fan joins it’s reflected in their newsfeed which encourages others to join. Oooooh viral.
• Send messages to fans
• Promote events (physical or virtual) to fans, which they promote via their pages when they RSVP
• Host forums for fans to connect with each other and your organization
• Share photos and videos
• Promote other sites (your formal website)

Here are some other pros of FB Pages:

• They are indexed by search engines
• They are viewable by non-facebook users
• Fan demographic data is captured and made available to you.
• Pages can be set to automatically accept fan requests which limits the need for administration

Which leads to the one big con:

• You cannot administer/moderate wall or discussion board posts before they go live. Once they are posted, you can delete anything you’d like, but you can’t hold comments in moderation like you can with a blog, for example.

That one downside will keep many organizations away from FB Pages. As much as I agree that transparent communication with your audience, both positive and negative, will build a great brand and great relationships, many CEOs or SESs will not love the threat of the unhappy customer. So pay an intern to sit and watch your page all day! Just get out there and connect.