With more than 64 million active users and around 250,000 new users joining every day, you can tap into the social networking revolution with a free page on Facebook for your blog or business … yes, I said free.

Previously you had to be BIG business with a BIG marketing budget to create a corporate or company Facebook account. Blockbuster Inc., CBS Corp., The Coca-Cola Co., Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., are examples of well known companies that have a corporate presence on Facebook. Facebook members could then become “fans” by adding your company as a friend.

Now, this option is open to any business. Businesses can add any content they want, including photos, videos and music. Facebook users can share information about a business directly with the company by adding reviews or other information to that business’ page. Small businesses now have the advantage that only Fortune 500 companies could afford previously. It’s simple: here’s how you do it:

Creating A Facebook Business Page

1. Visit this URL

2. Choose the best category for your business.

3. Just enter your business name and then click “Create Page”.

4. Now you can add a description of your business and a website address. You can also add a photo or logo. There are sections to add more photos, video

5. Then click on your hyperlinked business name in the top left corner and click “publish this page.”

6. Finally, from your new profile page, become a fan of your business. This is important as all of your “friends” will now be able to see your page when they visit your profile and it will be shown in the news feed that “Suzanne is a fan of Dot Com Mogul”. With some social networking, some of your Facebook friends will also add your business as a friend and then their friends will see a message… and on and on.

To the left is a screenshot of your admin panel. You can send updates to fans of the business and there’s a link to Promote Page with an Ad. You can also use the pages’ discussion board to start topics, list events, or write on “the wall”. I’ve just added a page for my blog, Dot Com Mogul. You can see it here. (While you’re there, add it as a friend I plan to add more interesting info and a video to it, but this is the beginning page with minimal information. If you’re wondering why you should do this, just check out the Facebook statistics below, and did I mention …. it’s free.

Facebook Statistics

General Growth

• More than 64 million active users
• An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007

User Demographics

• Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities

User Engagement

• Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States (comScore)
• More than 65 billion page views per month
• More than half of active users return daily
• People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily (comScore)

Applications

• No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore)
• Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined (comScore)
• More than 14 million photos uploaded daily
• More than 6 million active user groups on the site

International Growth

• The U.K. has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 8 million active users
• Canada is the third largest country with more than 7 million active users
• Remaining top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Turkey, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Colombia, and South Africa

Platform

• Over 15,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Here’s a list of my favorite WordPress plugins … a couple of these are worth mentioning, but I no longer use them. I noted the ones I’m not using and why. If you have any to add, just comment.

From Unwords … Definition of schizzle :.
(sh?t-z?l’)
1. (n.) A non-profane version of shit

Adsense-Deluxe 0.8
Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higer by Acme Technologies. I love this plugin. I don’t use Adsense on this blog, but you can use this plugin for easy insertion of other scripts and codes into your posts. Instead of placing the Adsense code in the configuration blocks, place your other code (I have several Chitika Mini Mall scripts configured in mine) there and adding the script to a post is as simple as adding <!–adsense#ShopCloud–> or <!–adsense–> to your posts where you want the script to be placed. You can configure as many of these scripts as you want or need and change them in all of your posts at the same time just by editing the script in the plugin screen.

Akismet 2.0.2
Comes with the WordPress installation and everybody has it so I won’t go into any detail.

All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings the author recommends using.

AntiLeech 1.8
By Owen Winkler. AntiLeech helps prevent content theft by sploggers. AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

Author Highlight
Author Highlight is a plugin that prints out a user-specified class attribute if the comment is made by the specified author. It is useful if you would like to apply a different style to comments made by yourself.

Bad Behavior
A whole new way of keeping your blog, forum, guestbook, wiki or content management system free of link spam. Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it..

Buy Me a Beer 1.3
Allow your blog visitors to buy you a beer by sending you money through PayPal. By Sherief Mursyidi. I just deactivated this plugin because nobody bought me a beer … lol

Comment Luv
Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, adding the dofollow plugin is one way to reward but why not place a link to their last post under their comment, with CommentLuv, you can do that automatically! This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers.

Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress
With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.

Democracy 2.0.1
This poll plugin is easy to use, install, and manage. It uses AJAX to load data, making it quick and fun to use. Add

{democracy:*id*}

to your posts to include polls in your posts, where *id* corresponds to the ID of your poll. By Andrew Sutherland. I love this plugin. Adds interaction to your blog and engages your readers into the conversation. You can make as many polls as you want and it’s easy to insert them in your posts or on your sidebar.

Democracy Widget 1.0
Adds a sidebar widget for use with Andrew Sutherland’s Democracy Poll widget. By Andrew Sutherland.

Digital Fingerprint Beta 0.2
This plugin enables you to easily and quickly search the web for potential cases of plagiarism and content theft. It works by adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts that you select (or all posts if you wish). You can then easily monitor the blogosphere for your digital fingerprint in the hopes of finding potential content thieves and scrapers abusing your content. By Kirk Montgomery.

Do Follow – disables evil no follow attribute on comments

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

Feed Footer
Feed Footer is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed. With this nifty plugin, you can:

1. Copyright Your Feed!
Add copyright notices under all your Blog Posts in the RSS feed

2. Monetize Your RSS Feeds.
Show and rotate ads under your blog posts in the RSS feed (maximum of 10 ads can be rotated.)

3. HTML Enabled Footers
Any HTML code can be shown in your footers! You can snazzy up your footers with banners and images! You can make your text bold or italics or underlined.

4. No Word or Line Limit.
Your footer ads and notices could be 200 lines long if you so desire!

Google XML Sitemaps 3.0.3
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold. I love this plugin. So easy to generate a sitemap for your blog and then it pings Ask, Google and MSN to tell them that you have a new sitemap. Great way to help you get all your pages indexed.

Got Banners 1.0
Got Banners is a simple plugin for rotating banners (especially 125 x 125px) like on TechCrunch.com & GotChance.com. Unlike other banner rotators, Got Banners rotate all of the banners putting them in a random order each time. By Shrihari Sankaran. I just downloaded this plugin but haven’t gotten around to implementing it yet. Looks interesting and useful.

IM Online
A neat little WordPress plugin to show your current online status on your blog, with Widget support for those that use them. The plugin is powered via onlinestatus.org and supports most IM services including AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber (inc. Google Talk), Skype and ICQ.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad 1.0
A new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog. By MaxBlogPress. I downloaded this then decided I don’t want a stripe above my header. Annoying to me, but a lot of blogs are using it.

Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers Plugin
NUS is a neat plugin that fetches all the subscribers who have not yet subscribed to your feed verifying themselves by clicking on the verification link in the email FeedBurner sends them. Many users simply do not verify and thus leaving a lot of readers who do want to read your feeds cannot due to the verification email going unnoticed or landing in the spam folder. NUS asks you for your FeedBurner username and password and fetches all those unconfirmed subscribers allowing you to send a personalized email to them asking them to verify their subscriptions.

PopShops.com 0.2
Affiliate tools that everyone can use. Put products on your site and earn money. Choose from the largest catalog of affiliate products — over 20 million! By PopShops.com. Just blogged about these two … Popshops and PrestoGifto. I like both of these and am using them on about 5 of my blogs now.

Popularity Contest
This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.

PrestoGifto 0.9
Now WordPress users can add Cafepress products to their blog by querying millions of products from the CafePress marketplace. By PrestoGifto.com.

RSS Footer 0.5
This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text. Turns the tables on scrapers. You get a link back from the content sucking scrapers. By Joost de Valk.

Social Bookmarks 4.0.64
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to about 50 different social bookmarking sites. Allows you to choose which ones you want to display. By Apostolos Dountsis.

Theme Test Drive
Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparently and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself.

Trackbackers
This plugin displays a list of the domains that link to your blog the most By Michael Wales.

What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin
Seth Godin advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site. By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade 0.8
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode. By Keith Dsouza.

WP-SphinnIt 1.0.1
Adds SphinnIt (a “make money online” sort of social bookmarking site–for affiliate marketers) button to your WordPress blog posts. By Michelle MacPhearson.

WP-Security Scan

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WP-Auctions
WP Auctions is a revolutionary plugin for WordPress which allows you to host auctions on your blog and to sell ANYTHING, completely fee-free!

Problogger also has a huge list of WordPress Plugins here.

Tell me what your favorite plugins are. Include the link if you’ve got it.