Earlier this month Facebook added a new feature called “pages” amongst other announcements.

Pages let you do what you’d think: create specific pages on Facebook for all sorts of reasons: business, community, political, artists, schools etc.

The big difference, compared to your profile, is that anyone on Facebook can view complete Pages without having to be added to your network/friends. This then solves one of my Facebook frustrations: the very limited viewing of your profile.

In fact, I think pages are a much better solution, as you can create specific pages for separate needs: I just whipped one up for my Rotary Club.

Anyone can view this page: not just the 40-odd people in my friends list who can see my full profile. It makes a lot of sense!

You can become a Fan of the page, which means (with your permission) you get to keep up to date with what’s happening on that page and you can interact with the apps on the page.

As Ed Dale pointed out in his Facebook video series on his page, there’s no limit to the number of fans (unlike profile friends, which are limited) and they can be added automatically.

Used in the right way, this will make Facebook incredibly powerful: you can broadcast relevant messages to your “fans” — and they are in control if your messages start to get spammy. There’s plenty of viral opportunity here, used correctly, to really help build your network, your online legend/persona and keep in touch yourself with what interests you.

I found a nice little “tutorial” online to activate the Pages feature (not as obvious as you’d think!) — http://www.eironae.com/geekd/2007/facebook-pages-continued/. It only took a few minutes to get it up and running.

Based on this kind of addition to Facebook, I’m more and more convinced it’s a community that will be extremely valuable to all businesses in coming months and years.