Gartner's "2010 and Beyond…" predictions for Information technology organizations and users has a whole section on Facebook. Sheesh, and I thought Twitter was the favorite new kid on the block but read along and see why Facebook dominated Gartner's report.

Key Findings

• Facebook continues to dominate as the most popular social network community, with over 350 million active users as of November 2009. If Facebook continues growing as it has, more than one billion users will be on Facebook by 2011 and about 70% of users are from outside the USA. 
   
  • My two cents on "The Opportunity": Businesses seeking a global audience should focus on Facebook as their primary marketing strategy. Strategies to promote their products and services using culturally relevant messaging to that country's audience will give them a huge advantage of their competition.
     
• 65 million people access Facebook using their mobile devices. Mobile careers are working to provide facebook apps that will appeal to these mobile users.
   
  • My two cents on "The Opportunity": Companies need to create mobile friendly websites. Inclusion of links to company websites won't do any good if mobile users cannot read the information displayed in their mobile devices. So 2010 strategy for businesses should be to create a mobile marketing strategy, first step of which is to make a mobile compatible website. 

Some other interesting facts shared by Gartner analysis include:    

• Facebook may face potential competition from Orkut in India and Brazil, V Kontakte in Russia, Mixi in Japan or QQ in China.

  Me thinks that since the chance of the Chinese portal QQ becoming available internationally appears slim to none (given China's politics), Facebook should only be concerned with the other three. Now I don't know about you, but I don't know how many companies are actively selling anything in Russia so that leaves Orkut and Mixi as real potential customers. (More musings on these three sites sometime soon in 2010.)

Since Gartner devoted a whole section on just Facebook, I'll jump on that bandwagon and summarize this:

Facebook is important folks. Whether you want to communicate to your stakeholders and prospects or whether you want to launch a new product or create a customer service support strategy, do it through Facebook.
 
Don't just create a fan page. Your strategy shold include tasks such as joining various groups and forums, offering discounts and coupons, advertising specials & promotions and basically building your fan base using quality messaging that engages and converts fans into customers.

As always, don't just get started with a fan page because you can or want to do it yourself. Think of a long-term strategy and also think of measurement criteria to measure performance. Last but not the least, think about the resources required to make Facebook Marketing successful.

Here's to your Facebook success in 2010….