Many people are addicted to Facebook and other social media websites. If you spend a few hours each day updating your status on all these sites, you can consider yourself a social media addict. There is nothing wrong with being addicted to these sites as long as you can find a way to use them to your advantage. Talking about the latest movie you have seen or what you intend to do next year is fun, but you don’t want to spend hours of your valuable time doing those when you can try to think of ways to get the most out of social media.

Those of you who are addicted to Facebook should not forget about some of the Facebook tools that are around. Some of them can help you get more out of your Facebook account and save time in the process. In fact, here are 5 Facebook tools that let you do just that:

Pagemodo: gives you an easy way to create Facebook pages to promote your products and services. We are talking about dynamic pages with your videos and photos.

TabSite: a very cool tool that lets you add a website underneath a tab on your Facebook page. Great solution for businesses and those who want to add a landing page to their Facebook account.

Face.com: gives you everything you need to build sophisticated photo recognition Facebook apps. This technology recognizes and tags faces like nothing else.

Static520: you don’t have to be a FBML genius to add your content to your Facebook pages these days. Not when you can take advantage of tools such as this one.

yoName: a powerful tool that finds people’s accounts for you as long as you know their first or last name. A phone number or e-mail address will do too.

You can find plenty of other Facebook tools online to do all kinds of things. Being involved on Facebook does not have to be a waste of time.

Facebook has been growing quite rapidly in the past few months. There are no signs that the company is stopping anytime soon. In fact, with its latest announcement, Facebook has told the world that it is here to stay, and we all better get used to it. Facebook need not be your enemy if you are a blogger. Sure, I consider Facebook to be distracting and something that makes me less productive. At the same time, it does offer bloggers the opportunity to get the word out about their posts and build a more solid community around their blog.

Facebook’s Social Plugins program is a set of tools that are developed to help website owners bring more interactivity to their websites. Whether you are a blogger hoping for your readers to recommend your top posts or a portal owner interested in letting the world know about your top articles, Facebook has a tool for you. There are at least 8 ways you can integrate Facebook Social plugins into your blog and take it to the next level. In this post, I am going to focus on the standard boxes and buttons. But let’s not forget there are more advanced ways to bring Facebook to your website.

As a blogger, you want to make sure the word gets out about your posts on Facebook. You also want to create a Facebook fan page for your blog and push it on your blog. Facebook Social plugins not only enable you to do those, it also can recommend your top links to your readers and even allow your readers to comment on your blog using their Facebook account. To implement these features, you are going to need these 4 tools:

• Like Button: adds a like button to your blog posts. It’s dynamic, so you can make it work with Wordpress or your specific blogging platform. What’s fun about this tool is the fact that it does not take more than just a click to work, but it can have a huge affect on the amount of traffic you receive and retain from Facebook. It can also be very compact, so your pages don’t look too busy to your readers.
• Like Box: if you have taken the time to start a Facebook page for your blog (which you should have), adding a Like Box to your blog will make it easier for your readers to give your Facebook page a thumbs up and become a fan of your blog as well. You can go beyond the simple box and show the faces of your visitors on your sidebar as well.
• Comments: let’s face it. Your visitors are not going to jump through hoops to leave comments on your blog. If you make the process easy for them, they’ll jump at the chance. Otherwise, only your hardcore fans will take the time to go through your registration process just to leave a comment on your blog. Now if you are using Wordpress, the process is fairly easy. Nevertheless, it never hurts to give people the option to leave comments on your blog by using Facebook credentials.
• Recommendations: my favorite plugin so far. The other plugins on this list are pretty much what we have seen from Facebook in the past. This tool looks at how people interact with your pages and recommends your top links to your visitors. If you are getting a whole lot of traffic from Facebook, this plugin is a must install.

There are of course many other social tools that you can grab from Facebook. You do not want to go overboard with these tools. So you have to be somewhat creative to get the best out of them. At the same time, these tools should give you the extra motivation to build outposts for your blog on other top social networking websites. The web as we know it is changing very rapidly. Facebook is changing too. However, it will be around for the foreseeable future. There is simply no reason not to take advantage of the tools that are provided to you by Facebook at this point (even though Facebook is far from perfect).

Facebook is the top social networking website these days. Millions of people use it to connect with friends, colleagues, and brands and to share information with others. It’s also a great place for marketers to reach out to their prospects to connect and possibly sell things to them. All bloggers should take time to get themselves familiar with Facebook and build a presence for their blog on Facebook. Creating a page on Facebook doesn’t take too much time, and you can do it for as low as free. But that’s not all you can do to expand your presence on your blog. Facebook has provided all of us with a simple-to-implement set of tools to bring Facebook to our own communities.

If you have been on Facebook for a while and are looking for ways to expand your blog by taking advantage of the power of this great community, here are a few tools you should take advantage of:

Share Button: you may not give this tool much of a chance but you’d be surprised how many people are willing to share your content on Twitter if it’s of high quality. Adding a small button on the top of your content never hurts.

Fan Box: once you have created a page for your blog, you should take time to add a fan box to your sidebar or pages. Giving people a tool they can use to connect with your Facebook presence is a very simple way to expand your following on Facebook.

Page Badge: if your blog design doesn’t allow you to add a fan page, you can always go with a more compact option, such as a page badge. Your page badge lets you promote your page and doesn’t take too much space.

FB Connect: Facebook connect doesn’t need any introduction. It’s a simple way of connecting your blog to Facebook and let your visitors comment on your blog posts using their Facebook credentials.

Fan Badges: if you happen to be a fan of a specific page you want to push on your blog, fan badgets come in handy. They are compact and very simple to implement. You can be a fan of your own page or push somebody else’s page.

These are not that hard to implement, but they can surely give your blog a traffic boost. There are of course other ways to push your blog on Facebook, which is why you should stay tuned for the 2nd part of this series.

I have to admit that I spend most of my time on Twitter. Facebook has been nothing but a hobby for me. There are people that do dedicate a lot of time to Facebook and have many friends on that website. If you have used Facebook before, you know that it’s easy to get overwhelmed with everything that goes on that website. All the polls, events, fun apps to play with can be very distracting. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had access to a service that organized your Facebook data for you and enabled you to network more effectively offline? That’s what Hotlist is all about. It’s a cool service that connects to your Facebook account and extracts your friends and their activities. So you can easily figure out where your friends are going to be in the future and where you can possibly meet up with them.

Hotlist lets you find out about events that are going on in your area. It provides you with a smooth overview of the locations where your friends are going to be at and the event descriptions as well. You can filter through your results by venue or events.

I am personally guilty of not connecting with people offline (not enough anyway). So it’s nice to have access to services such as Hotlist that make it easier for me to decide which events to attend or whom to catch up with. Being active on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t mean that you should stop meeting people face to face. With Hotlist, you can go about doing it much more conveniently.  The service needs a bit of work but it’s based on a good concept.

Facebook has been around for too long for me to tell you how important it is to take advantage of the community that is available to you free of charge. There are millions of folks on Facebook. Some are just there because their friends told them to. Others actively communicate with other community members and even participate in meet ups and other events. As a blogger and a business individual, you should take advantage of the featured offered by Facebook to gain more exposure for your blog.

Having a Facebook page with all your information on it not only allows you to engage the Facebook community but also get a viral campaign going. You can use your Facebook page to post your latest blogs posts and notes. Not only that, you can use Facebook social ads to drive traffic to your Facebook page. But perhaps the most powerful tactic you can use to drive traffic to your site from Facebook is by holding Facebook-exclusive competitions. You can ask folks to become a fan of your page and send your page to others for a chance to win a prize. The sky’s literally the limit here.

Your Facebook page can help you gain more visitors that you can handle. Due to the viral nature of the community, once folks start bookmarking your page, you can expect their friends to do so as well. The discussion board on your page can be a great way to hear your readers out and know exactly what they are looking for in future posts. Creating a Facebook page is for free, and it literally takes a few minutes to create. If you are looking to increase to your blog, you simply can’t afford to ignore Facebook pages.

Your take: do you have your own Facebook page? Share your pages here.

So let’s say you do blog, and you share your blog posts on multiple social networking and social bookmarking sites (hopefully you are using social Marker to do it all). But now you are getting more involved with Facebook (you should!), and plan to share you activities with your friends on FaceBook. What do you do then?

That’s where Environs comes in. Environ Beta is an innovative service that helpls you import all your accounts to FaceBook easily. All you need to do is provide them with your favorite username (hopefully the one that you use on most social networks):

The service will go through different social networks and fetches your account information. And you can then import them all to your FaceBook account. How cool is that?

Now I admit that I dig Environs a lot. But I was even more thankful that it reminded me the services that I should be using to promote my sites. Never a dull day in the online world. So are you using Environs? How do you think the service can be improved?