We talk a lot about building a presence on social media in order to build your online reputation. What many businesses don’t do, however, is take advantage of advertising on Facebook to make that presence even more powerful.

Similar to Google AdWords and other PPC engines in that the advertiser pays each time their ad receives a click, Facebook advertising has something the others don’t. They have an incredible amount of demographic data from the user profiles that each and every Facebooker creates. Advertisers, then, are able to harness that data to pinpoint target ads to Facebook users. So for example, while on AdWords you can target users’ search queries and geo-location, on Facebook, you can target based on any combination of the following attributes:

• Location (country, city, state)
• Age
• Birthday
• Sex
• Keywords
• Level of education
• Workplace(s)
• Martial status
• Language

At last count, Facebook shows that there are nearly 90,000,000 users in the United States alone that could potentially be displayed an ad. With the targeting options, advertisers on Facebook have an incredible opportunity speak to an audience of potential customers. That audience also happens to be one of the most captive audiences online right now – according to a recent Nielsen Online study, users spend an average of just under 6 hours each month on Facebook – 2x more than they spend on Google! That could mean some serious face time for any business.