Many professionals, businesses, and organizations are attracted to Facebook because with over 1.3 billion monthly active users it continues to be the largest online social network. But even if it seems like everyone is on Facebook, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should build your community there.

Three Thing to Consider Before Starting with Facebook:

• Is Your Target Audience on Facebook? It's no use trying to build up a Facebook community if the people you want to reach aren't so active on the platform. There are a couple of ways you can find this out. You could survey a sample of your targeted members about their Facebook usage and habits from another online platform, such as your blog, or you could just make a list of 10 to 20 ideal members and check out their Facebook pages. Even though you may not see all of their activity you can learn a lot by looking at how complete their profiles are and how much activity shows up in their streams.
• How do they use the platform? Put simply, where is the conversation happening and how is it happening? The best way to find this out is to just spend some time on Facebook watching the activity of potential community members, influencers, and other communities on Facebook similar to yours. What do you want to accomplish? Many people and organizations build pages on Facebook, but what they have is anything but a community. If they didn't hold contests or offer other perks and incentives, it would be a ghost town.
• What are your goals and objectives for your community? Is it a support group? Are you trying to convert members to buyers? Will your targeted members be interested in your community? What will they get out of it? Will you be able to effectively attract the attention of your targeted members? How will you do this?