But for Alex Morrissey of JamaicansMusic.com, that moment came when a party in Indonesia ran out of goats.

“We invited 200 people to the launch party, but because we’re on Facebook, 1,000 people came,” he said. “We had enough rice and peas, but we had to get more goats.”

A JamaicansMusic.com launch party in Indonesia, where the most Facebook fans reside, drew 1000 people.

But don’t let the goats fool you. Morrissey is as business-savvy as they come—even at 22. With a fast-growing music site started when he was in college, Morrissey is well on his way to becoming the Jamaican Mark Zuckerberg.

Today, Morrissey is proof that doing what you love can lead to success. And he says he wouldn’t be where he is today without Facebook.

The JamaicansMusic.com Facebook page now has more than 470,000 global fans—adding nearly 1,000 every day—making it what is thought to be the largest Facebook fan page of any in the Caribbean.

More importantly, the business is bringing in an income and has grown Morrissey’s business to five employees.

JamaicansMusic.com has used Facebook from early on to grow its fan base and revenue.

He Built It, They Came

Morrissey started the website a couple of years ago as a college student at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. He simply couldn’t find a good site dedicated to the reggae and dancehall music he enjoyed, so he created his own.

Alex Morrissey, now 22, started JamaicansMusic.com while still in college.

But likeminded fans of those styles of music soon discovered JamaicansMusic.com. There, they can listen to relevant Internet radio stations, watch videos and learn about artists.

“It was a personal thing where I could find all my favorite music,” he said. “When I noticed how many people were actually visiting, I started asking them questions about what they wanted.”

As traffic has grown, Morrissey has improved the content and started promoting it heavily through Facebook. He moved back to Kingston, Jamaica and opened an office. Now a multimedia company, Jamaicansmusic.com hosts live events and recently started its own Internet radio station and magazine.

Fans can access the company's Internet radio right from a Facebook tab.

He owes the site’s momentum largely to the growing Facebook traffic. But Morrissey doesn’t just post on the site’s wall. He’s taken a few strategic steps that have made all the difference: rich content on Facebook, attractive giveaways and geographic targeting of promotions.

Idea #1: Make your fan page interesting

JamaicansMusic.com brings people to the Facebook page with engaging and fresh content. First, the team posts several new items on the wall each day, usually music videos. The engaging posts typically generate hundreds of likes and multiple comments.

Additionally, the site offers interest beyond the main wall with multiple content tabs for information such as a top 10 chart, new videos, the world’s biggest reggaefest and access to the company’s own Internet radio station, JADIO.

Fans can always find out what's hot on the Top 10 tab on JamaicansMusic.com's Facebook page.

Fans can also play the popular game created by Jamaicansmusic.com, Song Writa, where they can mix their own music.

Created by JamaicansMusic.com, the Song Writa game lets fans make their own music.

Idea #2: Give away free stuff!

Like a savvy music industry pro, Morrissey teams with radio stations, record labels and companies at least once a week to run hot promotions that draw fans in flocks. Often that includes a relevant giveaway like concert tickets or free phones.

As a result of those sponsorships, along with display advertising and commissions from iTunes.com, Morrissey has monetized both JamaicansMusic.com and the Facebook page.

For the Song Writa game, JamaicansMusic.com launched the new offering with an event that took place December 15 on the Facebook fan page. To increase attendance, the company offered BlackBerry Curve smartphones and a $5,000 (Jamaican) credit from mobile phone company Digicel.

JamaicansMusic.com gave away Blackberry Curve phones to promote its new Song Writa game.

Those incentives helped draw 218 attendees. But more importantly, the launch helped drive early Facebook traffic up by 7,000 new fans over the course of four weeks. At its peak, about 15,000 users were playing the new game.

With Facebook, the growing startup saved major marketing dollars for its game launch.

“We were able to reach a large number of people interested in this game without spending any additional money on traditional means like newspaper ads,” Morrissey said.

Giveaways for the launch of the Song Writa game helped drive up the fan count by 7,000 and increase the number of gamers to 15,000.

Anything related to legendary musician Bob Marley always draws the greatest number of fans. When Marley’s son Damian released an album last year, JamaicansMusic.com teamed up with him.

A promotion with Damian Marley's new album brought in 15,000 new fans in two weeks.

The site ran competitions and gave away autographed CDs, posters and tickets to the live shows. Fans simply had to like the page to be entered. JamaicansMusic.com also hosted a live chat on Facebook with the artist, letting fans ask questions.

In just two weeks, the number of Facebook fans had jumped in response from 25,000 to 40,000.

The most impressive increase in fans came from the release of Vybz Kartel’s new and highly anticipated album. JamaicansMusic.com was given an exclusive track that was made available to fans for free if they entered their names and email addresses. Remarkably, the promotion brought in 5,000 new fans in just a few hours.

Idea #3: Target the audience geographically

Morrissey credits his success in attracting sponsors and advertisers largely to the page’s ability to provide specific demographic data. With tools such as Facebook Insights, he knows the breakdown of fans by country, gender and age, and shares that with sponsors. In fact, JamaicansMusic.com fans come from more than 230 different countries.

For example, Facebook Insights shows that, surprisingly, the greatest number of JamaicansMusic.com Facebook fans reside in Indonesia (more than 65,000).

Facebook Insights shows the exact global breakdown of the company's Facebook fans.

When meeting with advertisers, Morrissey shows them stats from Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

“Since we have such a large fan base in each country, we feel we can get a lot more awareness [for sponsors],” Morrissey said. “It’s better than traditional media or even advertising. We can target countries so advertisers get better results.”

For advertisers like Samsung, Johnnie Walker and Digicel, Morrissey directs messages, wall posts and promotions only for certain segments of the Facebook audience. When he posts on the wall, he uses the pull-down tab underneath the status box and chooses “Customize.”  There, he chooses to share with those only in specific countries. With geo-specific targeting, he can be relevant to a segment of fans without alienating others.

The company keeps content relevant with wall posts targeted to fans in specific countries.

For the Damian Marley promotion, JamaicansMusic.com used Facebook geographic targeting to reach fans specifically in South America.

“That’s been very attractive to advertisers,” Morrissey said. “Sponsors get really specific by geographic location and type of music.”

As JamaicansMusic.com expands its offerings to a global audience, Morrissey anticipates that the site will get even more strategic in pursuing advertisers for country-specific promotions.

“Our plan for the fan page is to find top companies in countries where there are lots of fans, and provide a proposal, saying, we have these fans, we can, if you become a sponsor, promote products and artists in your country, to get you exposure and help us as well,” he said.

What do you think? Have you tailored your content to your audience by geography or interest? Did it improve fan engagement? Leave your comments in the box below.

So let me ask you a question. Is your business leveraging the power of Facebook?

Keep reading to learn what’s changed with Facebook and to find out about a special event (from Social Media Examiner) just for businesses.

How Has Facebook Changed?

Facebook has changed a lot in the previous months—for example:

• Tabs are gone.
• Static FBML has been phased out.
• Users can masquerade as a page.

If a user can masquerade as a page, one of your competitors can leave a comment on your pages, promoting their page (brand) to your users. Get ready for a new kind of spam!

But there are many positive changes as well.

• Pages have been redesigned to be cleaner and less cluttered.
• You have more control over your news feed.
• You can get an email when anyone comments on your pages.
• iFrame apps have replaced Static FBML.
• You can offer deals to people checking in on a mobile device.

And did you know that you can make Skype calls from Facebook? Facebook is doing everything it can to become a one-stop source for people’s communication needs. And this is precisely why it’s so important for businesses.

How to Master Facebook for Business

If you’d like to learn how to take your business experience on Facebook to the next level, check out our latest Facebook Success Summit.

Watch this quick overview.

For much less than the cost of an in-person conference, you’ll learn from 19 of the world’s most respected Facebook experts in the privacy of your own office or home. They’ll give you the latest tips and techniques for using Facebook to boost your sales.

Why is this important? Because many people prefer to do business with companies that have a strong social media presence. They prefer to do business with people they know, like and trust. And using Facebook is the fastest way to create those kinds of relationships.

Our summits not only attract the best speakers, they also attract the best attendees. Employees from General Mills, Microsoft, Xerox, Sears, Disney, CNN and thousands of small businesses have attended our previous online conferences.

So if you sign up, you know you’ll be in good company. And 96% of the people who attended last year’s Facebook summit said they would attend again.

The summit starts October 5 and runs the entire month. The sessions are spread out so you have plenty of time to absorb all that knowledge. Each session is recorded, and you can download videos and transcripts.

We’ve even created a private LinkedIn group so you can stay connected with other participants throughout the conference.

Check out this partial list of speakers:

• Guy Kawasaki, author of 10 books
• Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Richard Krueger, co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies
• Paul Dunay, co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies
• Ekaterina Walter, social media strategist for Intel
• Chris Treadaway, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Michael Stelzner, author of Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

Sign up now and save 50%! Nowhere else can you learn from this many Facebook pros, ask questions, get videos of all sessions and stay connected for such a low price.

But wait! I almost forgot to mention the seven FREE bonuses worth $343 that you will get as soon as you sign up.

Go here for more information and access to a FREE class called Facebook News Feed Optimization: How to Dramatically Increase Your Visibility and Engagement.

But don’t take too long to decide. Seating is limited and many of our previous summits have sold out!

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Helps Businesses: Facebook announced a business resource center that makes it easier for marketers and advertisers to find the information they need to use Facebook.  This information used to be scattered across different locations and is now centralized through this page.

Use this Facebook for Business page to find everything you need to know about how Facebook can help your business.

LinkedIn Gives Businesses an Easy Tool for Job Applications: Businesses now have a LinkedIn app for job applications.  And job seekers can now apply for jobs with a few clicks on LinkedIn.  Watch the video below to see how you can also make changes to the LinkedIn Profile as you submit a job application.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=icche0kMP00

The Google +1 Button Experience Gets Faster: These little social sharing buttons now load faster on your web page. You don’t need to do anything to experience this improvement. In addition to these improvements, you can add a new asynchronous snippet which allows your web page to continue loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript.

Add this asynchronous snippet to increase loading speed even more.

Here are a couple of social media tools worth noting:

Webtrends Social: A new entry-level social suite from Webtrends: free for one Facebook page and one app.

With Webtrends Social, you can build, promote and manage your Facebook presence without having to write a single line of code or integrate disparate tools.

GPhangouts: To find public Hangouts on Google+.  Note: this site is not connected to Google.

There's also a Google Calender integration for your public Hangouts on Google+.

Sign up for these new social media magazines launching next month:

Social Media Magazines: These are four magazines on Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn for businesspeople, and they’ll be published in eight formats. The seven digital formats (iPhone, iPad, Android, Tablet, Blackberry, Kindle and Multi-Media) are all free. The print versions will be available on a paid subscription basis in September.

Subscribe now and check out the Social Media Mags website after they start publishing daily in August.

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner Presents: Facebook Success Summit 2011! (online conference). Join 19 Facebook marketing experts at Web’s Largest Facebook Marketing Conference. This is a special online conference designed to help you master Facebook marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner). Join Guy Kawasaki (author, Enchantment), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Dave Kerpen (author, Likeable Social Media), Paul Dunay (co-author, Facebook Marketing for Dummies), Jesse Stay (author, Facebook Application Development for Dummies), Robert Scoble (co-author, Naked Conversations), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), experts from Intuit, PETCO, Applebees and Intel; Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution), Chris Treadaway (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies) and Andrea Vahl (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies)–just to name a few. Go here to learn more.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

He also talks a lot about why Facebook can have a big impact on business, and explains why most companies approach Facebook the wrong way and what they need to do instead.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to use the “opportunity economy” to build your business
• Where the opportunities are for selling indirectly on social media
• How to get more out of your internal communications with a centralized control structure
• Why Facebook has a big impact on business
• Why you should think of Facebook as “email newsletters 2.0″
• The danger of Facebook “yellow-paging”
• Why you need to invest in actively maintaining your Facebook page
• Whether you should wait for the next “Facebook”
• Why you need to go where your customers already are

Connect with Jay on Convince and Convert and download the first chapter of his new book The Now Revolution.

Does your business have a Facebook page? What tips do you have to share for businesses using Facebook? Please leave them below.

Here are three recent Facebook-related studies that answer these very questions by examining how much time Facebook users invest in the platform, if Facebook ads are effective and other Facebook trends among online merchants.

#1: One-Third of Online Time Spent on Facebook Among U.S. Users

According to recent findings by market researcher Morpace, U.S. Facebook users are on the site for 1 of every 3 minutes of time spent online.  Users 18 to 34 years old spend the most time on the site per week (8.5 hours out of 22.4 spent online). Users 55 and older spend an average of 4.6 hours per week on Facebook.

The study also explored Facebook activity by ethnicity.  According to the results, Asians were the heaviest users of Facebook.  As a group, they devoted the most of their Internet time per week to Facebook (39.6%).  African Americans were the second heaviest users at 35.1%.  Hispanics spent the least amount of time on Facebook (31.7%).

Here's the breakdown by race/ethnicity of time spent on the Internet versus time spent on Facebook.

One of the most interesting stats from this study showed that Facebook users making at least $100,000 annually spent the most time on Facebook and on the web as a whole. This is valuable information for companies selling products and services online.

#2: Facebook Ads Most Effective On User Profile Pages

Facebook users spend more time looking at ads on their own Facebook profiles than they do on news feed pages (their homepages), found a new report by Mulley Communications.  Specifically, the study found that 71% of users looked at advertisements on their profile pages, while only 31% of users looked at advertisements on the news feed page.

In addition, 53% of users pay attention to page updates in their news feed wall, which may explain why they mostly ignore ads on their pages.

Here’s a short video to show the heat map of the news feed from the study.  Notice how there’s little activity in the right-hand side of the wall.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izg1EVeSocM

#3: Online Merchants Loving Facebook ‘Likes’

There’s been a lot of discussion about retailers extending the power of Facebook to their sites.  Website conversion company SeeWhy found that 35% of ecommerce online marketers have implemented Facebook’s “Like” plugin, while 33% plan to do so in the near future.

The second most popular Facebook social plugin was the login application, as 18% reported they had implemented it and 15% said they plan to do so in the future. The login plugin allows consumers to skip the registration step and login directly from the merchant’s site.  This allows conversion to be simple and quick, which is a huge advantage for the merchant.

Facebook social plugins have been getting a lot of attention from online merchants because they can drive traffic back to their own sites without having to build an entire ecommerce site into their Facebook page.  Although 26% of respondents said they plan to build ecommerce applications on Facebook itself, 67% said they plan to use Facebook to actually drive traffic to their sites.

In addition, 44% said they plan to use Facebook applications in place of microsites for launches and specific promotions.

Here's an example of the "Like" social plugin on the SocialMediaExaminer.com website. Fans can "like" the page without being directly on our Facebook page.

We want to hear from you! What do you think about these Facebook studies?  Do the findings help shape your social media strategy?  Let us know your thoughts in the box below.

If so, I can relate.  I was there.  My first attempt at using Facebook for business was a big flop.  For the longest time I focused most of my social media marketing efforts on Twitter.

But now my tune has changed. Facebook offers far more opportunities for businesses.  I predict that in the near future, businesses of all stripes will soon declare Facebook as their number-one social media target.

In this article I’ll demonstrate why your business needs to invest heavily in Facebook.

My First Facebook Experience: A Waste of My Time

I got my social media start on Twitter, not Facebook.  Twitter is an amazing social media tool.  In fact, I invested countless hours growing and nurturing my 24,000+ followers. I was pretty convinced I could just use Twitter for business.

Then someone I respected introduced me to Facebook.  I recall the email.  My friend Ann Handley from MarketingProfs asked me, “Are you on Facebook?”

I thought it was just for college kids.  But since Ann was there, I quickly signed up.  To my great surprise, many of my personal friends were there. It was cool to connect with old college buddies and get a sneak peek into their lives.

But immediately I ran into a problem. I wanted to use Facebook for business and my personal friends wanted nothing to do with my business. Facebook was fun for personal reasons, but I struggled with the business side of things.

So I set up a Facebook fan page to promote my book.  I started rejecting friend requests on my personal profile from strangers and asked them to become fans of my Facebook page I had for my book.

It quickly became a pain to manage a personal profile and a fan page. In fact, some pretty high-profile people (like Darren Rowse) were dumping their Facebook personal accounts because of this very conflict.

I decided to simply feed my Twitter updates into my personal Facebook profile and my fan page.  I went back to using Twitter as my primary tool.

I had determined that:

• Facebook is mostly for personal connections: My wife found enormous value sharing pictures of our kids and updates of our whereabouts with friends.  But I couldn’t do that because I had a bunch of business peers (and some strangers) as friends.
• Facebook is a time suck: I spent a lot of time on Facebook and frankly accomplished little.  At least on Twitter I knew I could strictly talk business.
• Everyone who mattered to me focused primarily on Twitter: I knew it was wise to keep investing my time in Twitter.  My growth of followers was steady and my traffic from Twitter was great.

Then I Saw the ‘List’ Light

The strength of Facebook is its amazing breadth of capabilities.  The weakness of Facebook is ALSO its amazing breadth of capabilities.  There are so many options and settings that most people don’t realize what Facebook can do.  Count me among the former clueless.

My turning point came when Mari Smith introduced me to two little features that rocked my world: friend lists and privacy settings.

Facebook allows you to set up an unlimited number of lists.  But it gets better.  You can decide precisely what people in lists can and cannot see with a few privacy settings.

For example, I set up lists called college, personal, church, business, fans and so on.  Then I went into the privacy settings and made sure the ‘fans’ list had no access to photos of my kids, my personal contact details, etc.

Here’s how this works…

You can go under your privacy settings (click on ‘custom settings’) and declare specific personal items only be viewed by certain lists (see below images).

Here I chose custom privacy for displaying family.

Then I selected my "Specific People," typed in the name of my personal list and clicked "Save Settings."

The result is my family is now only seen by people who are on my personal list.

When I get new friend requests, I can classify people to one or more lists (see below).

Here I have assigned a person to my 'Fans' group.

This was huge.  Not only could I restrict what people had access to, I could also selectively share with specific lists.  For example, I could let my friends know I was on an airplane to New Jersey crafting this very blog post (with my new iPad), and know with confidence that strangers had no clue I was out of town.

Here is an example of a post only my close personal friends saw.

Facebook Page Redux: Getting it Right the Second Time Around

All along I was treating my Facebook page like Twitter.  I thought that by simply posting updates I would build a loyal following.

I was wrong.

When we launched the Social Media Examiner Facebook page, I was determined to push the envelope and see what Facebook could do.

This time around, we created a custom landing tab with a welcome video from me.  I asked people to become fans in the video and encouraged them to comment on our wall.

Here's our welcome tab…

We set up a tab introducing our Facebook team.  Yes, we have a team managing our Facebook page.

We put together an editorial guide.  It included some clear guidelines such as:

• EVERY single wall comment gets a reply.
• Break news or discuss controversial industry changes.
• Delete anything that is self-promotional.
• Post an interesting link to someone else’s article each day.
• Make sure to post a link to our daily articles AFTER our email updates go out (to ensure email folks get the news first).
• Regularly ask interesting (and sometimes fun) poll questions to get our fans engaged.
• And a LOT more.

The response from our readers was immediate and it was incredible.  In the first few days we had 1000 fans.  After just a few months we exceeded 9000 fans.

And these folks are active.  They post questions, support each other, reply to our questions and promote our articles.  A vibrant community was building right before my eyes.

Almost overnight, Facebook became the number-one source of traffic on Social Media Examiner.

Why Facebook Over Twitter?

#1: Facebook is communal.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook makes it very easy for group discussions.  Twitter is primarily a one-to-one or one-to-everyone tool.  With Twitter you can’t easily interact with two or three people at once, for instance.  And you certainly can’t easily see what others have had to say about a post.

But Facebook has grown to over 500 million active users for a reason.  They make it really easy for people to connect at a human level.  And Facebook knows what its fans are interested in.

For example, if you frequent a fan page, Facebook knows you care about that page and shows you popular posts and discussions from that fan page in your live feed, above others.  If done right, this is marketing gold!

When your Facebook page shows up in the live feed of your fans, it encourages rapid discussions and a chain reaction.  When your fans engage in those discussions, it shows up on their walls.  Their friends discover your page and your following grows.

In this regard, Facebook is like blog comments on steroids.  When people interact with your brand, you are building community.  This moves people from passive observers to advocates.  And that’s a powerful marketing weapon.

#2: Facebook pulls people to its site OFTEN.

Part of the brilliance of Facebook is how it taps into some of our innate human desires.  Every time someone posts something on your wall, tags you in a picture or tags your wall, you are notified in some way.  For most people, this is an email with topic like “Joe Smith commented about a picture of you.”  Or it’s a little red number at the top left of the screen when you are in Facebook.

These little mechanisms are intentional ways to get you into Facebook and interacting.  It’s almost impossible to ignore these cues.  If you’re like me, you’ve been conditioned to check Facebook almost as often as you check email.

Twitter doesn’t have the same systems to pull people back.

This is a huge advantage of Facebook and a primary reason you need to be there.  The more people connect with others on Facebook, the more this grows.  The upside is huge.  This is why Alexa ranks Facebook as the second most frequented destination in the world, just behind Google.

Your customers, prospects and fans are already there A LOT.  And when they arrive, they’ll likely see your page updates if you’ve figured out a way to get them to engage with your Facebook page updates.

#3: Facebook reveals powerful social proof.

This one is a brilliant move.  If you click the Like button on an article (inside or outside of Facebook), something amazing happens.  The next time one of your friends goes to that page, your name is displayed as someone who likes the page.

This is powerful.  “If John Doe (whom I respect) likes this page, then maybe I should take another look?” is the thought that might go through the mind of a reader.

But wait, it gets better.

If you use the “Like Box” feature on your website, Facebook displays the pictures of familiar faces that are also fans of a page.  For example, if some of your Facebook friends are fans of Social Media Examiner, you’ll see their pictures if you scroll up and look to the right of this page.

This is amazing social proof because it only shows people you know.  That increases the likelihood you too will become a fan.

So What’s the Business Advantage?

Now let me connect the dots.  With 500 million people on Facebook, chances are more of your customers are active on Facebook than any other network.

Remember the benefits early movers had with Twitter?  Think of Comcast, Ford, and Zappos and the early mover advantages they gained.

Now think about Facebook.  Businesses are just now figuring out how to use Facebook. This is your chance to connect with your customers and prospects in a totally new way and build powerful advocates.

Investing in Facebook now is the equivalent of purchasing real estate in downtown New York just before all the other businesses move into town.

Facebook is also investing in helping businesses succeed.  Beyond their powerful and granular advertising, they’re extending the Facebook experience off of their site with features such as the Like Box and the Like Button.  This is just the beginning of what’s to come from Facebook.

So what are you waiting for?

Your Action Plan

Here are a few simple things you should do right now…

• Customize your Facebook page using Static FBML.
• Leverage creative ways to grow your Facebook fan base.
• Work on engaging your fans.

Has Facebook become your new favorite social media site? Are you using it for business?  Do you have any tips to share?  Do you disagree?  Let’s talk.  Leave your comment in the box below.

The topic of this show is Facebook—and how it can help your business.

And the special guest is Mari Smith, a relationship marketing and Facebook expert. In this video Mari shares her expertise on Facebook and how businesses can immediately benefit from the world’s largest social network.

This video was is a recording of a recent live video broadcast. You will notice Mari and I speaking via video and participants entering their questions into a chat window.

VIEW VIDEO HERE NOW:

Please note there is a very slight delay between my lips moving and my voice. This occurred because I recorded my audio directly into my computer rather than from the live stream.

What did you think about the video? What are your thoughts on Facebook?