Facebook’s all the rage these days, and for good reason.  When Microsoft hand-waved $10 billion for the online social network application last week, one couldn’t help but notice that $10 billion is quite a significant bump from Yahoo’s $1 billion a mere year ago.  Whether or not one agrees with the $10 billion valuation, it’s hard not to be impressed with Facebook.  It’s far and away the number one site visited by college students, and from the perspective of a web junkie sitting right outside the UC Berkeley campus and its attendant dorms, “Facebooking” isn’t just an urban slang term, but a fact of life, gaining on email as the primary form of communication between friends, and not merely a social media and networking company, but–with the 4000+ third-party applications developed–an increasingly serious technology platform.

Dave McClure recently outlined a Facebook strategy for businesses on Techcrunch, and some statistics he throws up are horribly intriguing:

Over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month.

In a few short months Facebook has quickly become one of the most impressive user acquisition channels on the web, rivaling SEO & SEM strategies for priority with new startups. Over 60 Facebook applications have more than 1 million total users, and over 40 have at least 100,000 daily users.

Whether you’re a business, a 2-man startup, or a non-profit, “the most impressive user acquisition channel on the web” is going to be interesting stuff.  After all, we’re into our users.  How do we get connected to them?  How can we get an influx of new users and adopters?  How can we engage them so they’re spending an average of 20 minutes on the site everyday?  McClure outlines 7 things to consider when graphing your Facebook strategy.  It’s a great introduction to Facebook for those who aren’t yet savvy, and it’s great advice for those of us trying to get our heads around the potential value Facebook might hold for our organization.  One thing to note: it’s not enough to simply “get on” Facebook.  How you do it and what you do once you jump onboard are absolutely important.  Hence, the need for a strategy.

Stay with me for just a moment before running off to read McClure’s essential primer.  For college students, Facebooking’s their way of connecting not only with their own social network, but a means of making new ones.  More importantly, and more applicably, it’s one of their ways of tapping into their friends’ interests that they would never have tapped into otherwise.  So the question facing application developers and non-profits is: how can I make sure my interest/application/presence stays on a user’s Facebook profile long enough (and prominently enough) to experience some of that viral distribution?

That’s the hard one.

With over 4000 applications swirling in the Facebook maelstrom, and more being added everyday, what hope do we have of finding traction?  I’ve heard college students say, “It was cool in the beginning, but I turned it off after a while,” meaning all those applications soon turned into mere inundation.  Watching college students pick up applications, it’s sometimes surprising to see them drop the applications just as easily, often within the same day, or even the same hour.  How to make an application or presence on Facebook sticky?  I’d refer a reader to McClure’s last point: using virtual currency to move a new user from bystander to citizen.  It’s the same problem non-profits face: how do I move someone from signed-up member to activist and eventually, donor?

X me and Superpoke! are two of the top ten applications on Facebook.  What they have going for them is a virtual interaction that is immediately accessible after the application is added: hug, poke, kiss, love, punch.  It’s a low threshold actionable item for a user to immediately engage the application and–more importantly–to engage others. Virtual gifts also provide the same social interaction.

What I’m trying to say with all this is that getting onto Facebook is a first step.  But it needs to be accompanied immediately by a bunch of other steps: actionable items coupled with opportunities to find more information, and a virtual interaction of some sort that engages or stimulates interest and catalyzes Facebook’s viral potential.  And thinking of these steps all together at the same time constitutes the sort of strategy we’re going to need to be successful.