What is the benefits of facebook likes ?

[Ruby707]

1 Expression of Affinity. A Like is an expression of casual affinity. It indicates the visitor has an interest in your business and wants to hear from you. It's similar to someone opting-in to receive email updates. This can lead to the building of more personal relationships with customers and a greater degree of engagement with them, as well.
2 More Engaged Users. According to Facebook, people who click the Facebook Like button are "more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user." Facebook claims the average "Liker" has 2.4 times the amount of friends than that of a typical user and he or she is also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook. Likers click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical user, says Facebook.
3 Email Marketing Capability. Once people Like your page, they are added to your fan base. Using the messaging feature contained in the page's administrative console, you can send broadcast-style emails to all your fans, or target them based on demographics, such as age, gender and location. While this tactic should not be overused, sending an occasional email is another way to stay top of mind with customers.
4 Viral Syndication of Content. Whenever you post content to your Facebook Page, it has the potential of appearing in your Fans' news feed. To be clear, there is not a 100 percent guarantee that every item gets shared. For those that do, a full news feed story - Facebook's term for news item - is displayed that can include a hyperlink to the source of the posted item, a thumbnail image, and text copy from the shared item.
Facebook reports that the average user has 130 friends who can also Like the item once it's published. That means, depending on the number of fans you have multiplied by the number of friends they have, your content could achieve wide viral syndication. That can lead to increased traffic to your Page as a result. If the posted content originated from your website, that could mean more traffic comes to your site, too.
5 More Traffic to Website. Speaking of more traffic, incorporating the Like button to your website can serve you well in terms of increasing traffic. Each time visitors click the button, information about your site is shared with their friends via the News Feed, which can result in more traffic.
6 Also, Like buttons are among the easiest to use of all the Facebook social plug-ins, requiring only a small piece of code to be embedded on a web page or website. Even those merchants lacking technical skills can incorporate it.
7 More Effective Advertising. Facebook's advertising platform keeps a record of all Like activity. Merchants who use this platform can access this data to produce more highly-targeted ads. This means merchants can achieve a greater degree of relevance with their advertising.
8 Likes Lead to Insights. Associated with every Facebook Page is an analytics component called Insights. It provides detailed data on fan activity on the page, as well as demographic information such as age, gender and geographic location, all of which can be important for the purposes of market research.