Is Facebook a Useful tool

Engage! Facebook is a pretty powerful tool for any business. It is just a matter of how you want to utilize it based on the nature of your biz. Its definitely good for branding so marketing locally is quite advantageous.

It can be, if you use a fan page or an app of sorts. A custom fan page seems to be the trend nowdays, but facebook has taken the FBML code out of the works. Usually you could create an app for a fan page using the code, but its all moving over to iFrames.

best thing to do about that, would be to build a mini site or "canvas" of your fan page in html, javascript etc., host it on your own domain, and then link it to a canvas application using FB developers. What then happens is that the canvass app loads the page everytime someone accesses your fan page, and they can then see everything you want them to see, laid out the way you want it to be and not just a default FB page.

It's kinda complicated in the beginning, but i can find a few good tutorials that could help you through it, if you like.

Paid advertising on facebook has typically low coversion rates, as unlike with Google Adwords, people aren't actually searching for your product or service.

Having a presence on Facebook (as a business page) is different however and can be really successful. Mainly as it allows you to re target users as often as you like (although hopefully not too often..you will notice people UN-liking you)

Great points. Having a business page on Facebook is entirely different than paying for advertising on Facebook and should definitely yield different results.

Paid advertising on Facebook also has its benefits, though I think it is more effective when combined with a FB company page and promote FB posts than company landing pages.

Inducing more engagement and personality into posts is what I believe more key in FB marketing, etc.

I would have to agree with this, despite us having a fairly active Facebook Business page, most of our endeavours to attract new business from the paid ads fail.
We offer both B2B and Consumer services, I think that most (the majority at least) people on Facebook are only logged in to chat and socialise with there friends and family and adverts are seen as an annoyance and ignored.

There is an art to be able to tap into that for your business, but we don't seem to have it!

We stick with Google! Where people are searching with intent

I've had Facebook and Twitter up now for about 5 weeks - I have had 30 people follow me on Facebook and 160 on Twitter. When I look into the traffic source on my web statistics more hits come from tweeps.

good stuff, but the burning question is, can you attribute any sales yet?

I think lots of ways to online market that social media network is one of the best source to online market . So Facebook is best tool to promote any business hence 95% people have used.

Feel that twitter is a more useful tool for us. We find it easier to engage with people and it gets us website traffic (not a great deal) than facebook has ever done.