Facebook has enjoyed boasting about their highly active users over the past few years. One statistics that they often state is that 50 percent of “active users” log in to the site on a daily basis. Facebook has most definitely changed the way we interact with each other and for many it has become heavily integrated into our daily lives. I decided to compile the top reasons that users log in to the site and have posted them below.

1. Stalk People

Let’s be honest, there are many motives behind connecting with others and on Facebook one of those primary motives is to stalk people! One of the best things about Facebook’s stalking features is that they are about to be upgraded! With the real-time news feed, you will be able to see a lot more about what your friends are doing in real-time. So go ahead, stalk your friends and don’t worry because they’ll never know!

2. Share Photos

Facebook is now the largest photo sharing site on the web. The main reason for this growth is the ability to tag your friends in photos. While social tagging has been around before Facebook, tight integration into the social graph has proven to be extremely powerful. It also naturally improves your ability to stalk people given that they are constantly being tagged by others.

3. Play Addictive Games

When Facebook opened their platform two years ago they weren’t expecting the site to become the central platform for the future of social gaming but soon enough it was. The most popular application on the site based on daily active users is Pet Society and overall, a large percentage of the top 100 applications on Facebook are games. If you are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that you have played a game in the past month and many more are playing daily.

4. Advertise Your Business

While Facebook’s advertising platform is still in its infancy, many businesses are taking advantage of the site’s ability to efficiently target users based on specific demographic information. Many of the advertising opportunities are still being explored including “nanotargeting” which is the ability to target a single user via a Facebook advertisement.

5. Monitor Your Children

The fastest growing demographic on Facebook over the past few months has easily been parents, more specifically: mothers. Facebook can be a parent’s dream come true. While the site can occasionally provide parents with more information than they ever wanted, Facebook can also be used to increase communication between parents and their children.

6. Meet Other People

While Facebook is supposed to be for connecting with those that you’ve meant offline, the launch of the Facebook platform brought about a number of applications which have served as powerful tools for connecting previously unconnected users. Some of these applications are for meeting fellow singles to date while others are for connecting within virtual communities. However you are connecting with others, Facebook is rapidly spawning millions of new relationships.

7. Create An Application

While everybody isn’t a developer, Facebook has been extremely effective at attracting new developer talent to build applications on top of the Facebook platform. Facebook initiated the movement toward a more open social web with the launch of their platform two years ago, and they are continuing that movement today. The result has been numerous applications which now are legitimate businesses for hundreds if not thousands of developers.

Many more developers have attempted to build powerful applications on top of the Facebook platform, and despite their failure to attract a mass following, the opportunity provided to developers is frequently too good to pass up.

8. Check Tagged Photos

Embarrassing photos have become a permanent fixture in the media when referencing Facebook. Thanks to the large amount of buzz resulting from articles about individuals being fired and relationships ending due to inappropriate or compromising photos, millions of users log in soon after they are alerted to a newly tagged photo of themselves.

9. Reply to Messages

Facebook is a communication platform and messages are a central component of that communication. Every time we receive a message, an email arrives in our inbox to notify us of that message. Many users (including myself) have complained about the lack of features within Facebook’s messaging system. Despite its downfalls, Facebook messages are one of the most important features of the site.

With the growth in mobile Facebook usage, Facebook’s messaging system has witnessed continued growth and we can only assume that this growth will continue for the foreseeable future.

10. Search For Old Friends and Ex-Lovers

Often times we log in to Facebook just to find a person we happen to be thinking of at that moment. It can be an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, as well as a childhood friend, or even a distant relative. Whoever you are thinking about, you can log in to Facebook and search for that person. More often, that person now has a profile on Facebook. You can find most people that you’re looking for on the site and that’s why millions of people are logging in every day.

11. Chat With Others

Facebook chat only launched recently but every day that I log in, I end up getting tons of messages (as long as I’m not invisible). From other people that I’ve spoken to, chat has become an increasingly active component of their Facebook usage. As I said before, Facebook is a communication platform and chat is now an integral component of communication on the site.

12. Update Your Status

Status has been an important component of Facebook since early on and with the increasing popularity of Twitter, status is becoming even more important. Users don’t actually need to visit the site to update their status though. Many use their mobile phones to update their status and then wait for the comments to flow in. Status updates were created by Facebook and are now becoming an integral component of general communication on the web.

13. Take A Break

In the world of the cubicle workplace, we often are seeking for ways to take a break from performing the task at hand. According to some statistics Facebook has single handedly resulted in an overall decrease in domestic productivity as well as abroad. Regardless of the productivity impact, it’s clear that workers are using Facebook during their downtimes and any time they wish to take a break.

14. Converse With Customers

More important than how you are wasting time is how you are making money and Facebook is a great platform for doing that. Through Facebook Pages, brands have the opportunity to interact directly with their customers, engaging them in a two-way dialogue. I believe that over the next few weeks and months we will see a surge in Facebook Pages adoption as new services arrive to make it easier to build a presence. This is just one of the many reasons users log in to Facebook!

15. Figure Out Your Event Schedule

If you have a lot of friends on Facebook then you probably have a lot of event invites. Whether or not you are attending them, Facebook has become a central location for finding out what events or taking place on any given day. One of the main reasons we log in to the site daily is to figure out what’s going on and what events our friends are going to. If you are on Facebook, then you are most likely creating and RSVPing to events.

16. Create Buzz

Guerilla social media marketers (or whatever you want to call them) have a heavy presence on Facebook and are actively trying to figure out new ways to increase their reach through the site. Whether it’s finding more friends, posting more status updates, creating fan pages, purchasing ads, setting up events, tagging users in photos, or anything else, many users perform certain activities for the sole purpose of generating buzz.

17. Participate or Create Groups

Groups are the central place for organizing large numbers of users together around a single purpose on Facebook. Many times groups will surge beyond thousands of users and suddenly there are ongoing conversations that are formed. Users that participate in these conversations return regularly to talk with other users about the topic being discussed in that group.

18. Approve New Friend Requests

Adding friends is one of the most important parts of the Facebook experience. The average user has somewhere around 150 to 200 friends and logs in every time they receive a new friend requests. Without friends on Facebook, the experience would be a pretty poor one which is why the company attempts to suggest new friends as soon as users register, increasing the likelihood that they’ll become an active user.

19. To Check Application Requests And Notifications

When the Facebook platform first launched almost two years ago, application requests began flooding in. The primary reason behind this flood of requests was that there were no limitations on how many applications could send. Despite the eventual limitations that were enforced, application requests and notifications continue to fill up within users’ “request” area. Cleaning out your requests is a good reason to log in every day.

20. Check Birthdays and Send Gifts

Facebook has become a central location for checking up on our friends’ birthdays. Rather than storing birthdays in your calendar, you can simply log in to Facebook and check out who’s birthday it is. You can then be one of the hundreds of people to post “Happy Birthday!” on their wall. To stand out from the rest, you can even send them a gift. Birthdays continue to be one of the most important reasons people log in to Facebook everyday.

So what was the reason that you logged in to Facebook today?