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The average Facebook user has 120 friends.^[1] Imagine your reach if 80% of your contacts became a fan of your service, and 30% of their friends became fans, and so on.  Now pair that potential with the growth figure of 50 million users just in the first quarter of this year. This equals 1/4 of their 200 million total registered users to-date.

The team at Facebook has understood the power of these numbers, and are finally exercising the true marketing potential in the “social network” beyond targeted banner ads.

We’re noticing today that Facebook is now suggesting what you might be a “fan” of – based upon pages that your friends and network have indicated that they are fans of.  If  you click to the “Discover People You May Know” tool you’ll see that you can either “Add as Friend” or “Become a Fan”.

It’s a wonder that it’s taken Facebook this long to integrate this tool, since it seems like the next logical step after suggesting friends is suggesting apps, fan pages, or groups.  But better late than never.  Facebook is certainly helping themselves, as well as brands, companies and other “fan items” such as movies, tv shows and locales by offering these suggestions.

Facebook is just now really harnessing the power of pairing social networking with new media marketing.  In addition sneaking brands into your “suggested friends” feed, they are sprinkling “highlights” and advertisements into your homepage stream.  They’ve done it tastefully so that it fits into the scan of your Facebook homepage without being too intrusive.

This new addition and the new look that Facebook has adopted over the last couple of months demonstrates why it’s even more important to build a large fan base for your “fan page”.  The more fans you have, the broader your reach for suggestions will be because of nature of networks.

Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg says in a blog post this week:

We’ve found that interaction with [Engagement Ads on the homepage] increases 50 percent when someone sees a friend’s action, such as a comment.

Sandberg also talks about connectivity, the power of mass scale, and the speed at which information can travel in social networks:

Stream communication, rather than reciprocal and direct communication, forms your active network. Whenever you interact with a story in the stream–whether you “Like” a piece of content, comment on it or simply click on it–the person sharing it becomes part of your active network. When our Data Team measured active networks for users on Facebook, it found that, in any given month, users keep up with between 2 times and 4 times more people than through more traditional communication…

With greater connectedness has come the ability for people to influence one another with more speed and efficiency. We’ve seen this lead to people spreading information and organizing events on a mass scale, often within days and weeks. For example, within weeks of T-Mobile airing an advertisement, Facebook users organized thousands of people to recreate the ad with a “Silent Dance” at the same station.