Be careful here, you are talking in absolutes.

If you are b2c you should definitely take a close look at facebook as a part of your marketing strategy. No, not for your friends / family but so you can pay for targeted facebooks ads to show to your potential customers to get them to like your page.

My startup now has over 35,000 'likes' on our facebook page, all in our target demo / market. This is huge. We now have a captive audience we can market to. I would put this just as high as building an email list and consistently marketing to that list.

YES it drives revenue, and more importantly awareness.

I've worked a lot with PR, marketing and user acquisition methods for different startups the last couple of years and I can't agree with this article. My experience is the opposite, work with Facebook as much as you can, even if most of the "Likes" comes from friends.

There's two (combined) reasons for that:

1. It's really hard to acquire users. With or without budget, the most important part of a startups success is the ability to find and get onboard new users/customers. Facebook might only be one method of getting people sign up for your service but hey, it's one of the most effective ones. If 200 people click "Like" on the same day, of course it will go viral if it's a cool startup. Friends or not, it 's people and most of them have great networks of other people around them. People with many friends are more likely to succeed not only with your Facebook Page but with the business itself. Guess why? People know people, even if they're not themselves in the right target group. Get many people like you, and they'll like what you're doing (and their friends to, hint).

It's no rocket science, really. Facebook is very effective for marketing. Use it. Tips: start the page as fast as you can. Growing the amount of fans takes time, with many invited friends or not. If you get pre-launch press, use it for something. To have 200 FB fans when you launch for real are very valuable.

2. Retention. Facebook is great as a reminder to people. If you have many FB fans, you have many people to remind about your startups existence. Facebook is useful for getting long-time value of a initial interest/hype/launch. Actually more effective than newsletter subscriptions for some of the projects I'm involved in.

Just a general comment about the site: I love your logo and headline styling, but why is the body text so unreadable? I know I can just ctrl+ it, but it seems that if you're building a better TechCrunch content-wise, why not shoot for better readability [reference intended] of the actual content? The emphasis looks like links and the graphic takes up a lot of room for an element that doesn't add anything.

My Facebook page allows me to broadcast content to my fans. That's valuable.

I've found that it's not all that effective when I'm promoting content that my readers get through my e-mails, RSS, or website, but it's actually really great when I'm promoting a sponsor (I'm in the employment space). I can usually send some extra clicks to my sponsor, and that makes the campaign look better.

Most startups need to focus where their market is. If you're in B2B or focused on selling something to startups, you need to be on Twitter.

If you're more of a general consumer product, you should be on facebook, but not on a fan page, you should be trying to get users to "Share" your content.

Fan Pages can be a good way to communicate with existing customers or blog visitors, but it's not really an acquisition mechanism.

Your points about your Facebook network of friends not being your target market is many times true, and something I had not thought about. Good insight Paul.

You should not just focus on twitter, but leverage community sites like HN. Also, social media is just one ends to a mean. There is always the good old fashion hustle in the streets to get that initial traction.

Great article - makes sense for many businesses, but not all. Getting your friends on Facebook could be very valuable if your friends ARE your target customers.

I am with the author. I deactivated my FB account back in December. I don't trust friend's opinions and don't trust facebook to securely store personal data of mine or prospective users. Before adding the pretty bells and whistles, make sure your site attacts users and works correctly before wasting valuable design time.

What about early adopters who "like" your site, come to your fanpage, and get their friends to check it out?