If you’re like many small business owners who want to take advantage of social networking as a marketing tool, building a Facebook page is a good place to start.

New York Times business columnist Kermit Pattinson offers the following tips for launching a Facebook page and using it to market your business:

1.Start small and hone in on your main objective. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Create an online customer service site? Or maybe you want to focus on direct sales. Ask your friends, family and best customers to sign up as a fan of your page when it launches so it can begin to grow by word-of-mouth. Because there are so many tools available on Facebook, you can quickly get off track. Make sure your content is lively and the page reflects the personality of your business.

2.Don’t think of the page as just a sales tool – use it to interact with customers by asking for information and responding to their complaints. Keep content fresh with status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything else of interest. This can take a lot of time but the payoff is often worth it.

3.Facebook allows for better target marketing. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and more so you can get your message to your target market. When you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly. Advertisers can choose to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates. The Facebook ad system also provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through.

Small businesses should begin taking social networking more seriously, says a new study by Business.com.

The 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study shows how and where businesses and business people are using social media.

Some employers ban the use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, believing that they are simply time wasters. But the study points out that these sites can be a terrific resource for marketing, lead generation and increasing web site traffic. The study also touches on how businesses can use the video-sharing site YouTube and search engine optimization to their advantage.

In his blog on ContentMarketingToday.com,Newt Barrett gives six compelling reasons why you should jump on the social networking bandwagon now. He says that old-school marketing techniques don’t work as well anymore as more customers make buying decisions online. Online marketing, like creating a blog or Twitter feed, costs little or no money. And since many small businesses haven’t adopted social media, you can get a jump on the competition.

Using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to get the word out, the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit Living Beyond Breast Cancer nearly tripled the number of groups participating in its annual Yoga Unites event and doubled the amount of money raised at last year’s event.

The organization is one of many nonprofits turning to social networking sites to reach more donors and volunteers. A recent survey found that 86 percent of nonprofits are on at least one social networking site, and the majority of them have joined in the past two years.

The groups are taking a page from the Obama campaign’s playbook.  The Barack Obama team took advantage of online outreach to reach more voters and raise significant sums of money through small donations.

Some call it “friend-raising,” but social networking, in many ways, is the 21st century answer to good old-fashioned word-of-mouth fundraising.

“It’s the fastest way to get to people,” Bill Cowen, director of the public relations program at Villanova University, told the Philadephia Inquirer “In a downturned economy, it’s one of the most cost-effective means of promotion.”