You may be asking yourself, "My business already has a regular website, so why does it matter if I have or don't have a Facebook fan page?" The answer is reach. You want your message to reach as many people as possible. To be able to maximize this reach, you need to have a presence where most people are hanging out - and increasingly, they're hanging out on Facebook.

Take Burger King as an example. They have made headlines over and over again with their innovative and viral social marketing campaigns, most  recently with the "Whopper Sacrifice." Burger King offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would "unfriend" 10 of their social network connections. It was a weird, but clever campaign.

We're starting something new here on the HilalSpark blog. Every month, we will be making one "Follow Friday" blog post (on a Friday, of course) that will have a list of 3-5 Twitter users who we feel you should be following as well. This will allow our readers to meet and network with new people of their interest/industry. Thanks to Chris Brogan and Micah Baldwin for the idea.

Let's get to it:

Ever since we began blogging on HilalSpark as well as regularly posting on our Twitter account, we have been closely watching our analytics to better get to know our audience. One of the things we keep a close eye on are the sources of our traffic - such as what blogs are linking to us, who's tweeting about us, as well as a few other metrics that help us understand what others are expecting of us as an Islamic media company. 

We are excited to announce that our latest iPhone/iPod Touch application is approximately 2-3 weeks away from being launched into the market (iTunes App Store).

We have been eagerly working hard for this moment for nearly 5 months. This is the first in a series of applications that are aimed at enriching the learning experience.