Our first annual ranking of the companies making social media work.

Lists seem to have an irresistible lure for business publications. Some have been with us for so long—the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Fortune 500, Forbes’ billionaire list—that it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist.

Still, at The Big Money we believe there is room for a different kind of list, one that measures value not strictly through dollars and cents but rather by how companies are performing in the nebulous yet all-important world of social media. Thus, we present The Big Money Facebook 50, a ranking of companies making the best use of Facebook.

Why Facebook? After all, social media is highly fickle; there is some reason to think that as soon as a site becomes an effective platform for corporate promotion, its irrelevance is imminent. That could still happen to Facebook, and in the last several months Twitter has gained a lot of momentum and millions of users. (We’ll unveil the Twitter 12 later this week.) For now, however, Facebook still offers several advantages over its rivals: size, return usage, and the depth and variety of what companies can do.

How did we compile this list? First, we defined a universe: A company did not qualify for this list unless its Facebook page(s) had a minimum of 200,000 fans. Within that universe, we rated the companies using a variety of criteria: how often they update their Facebook offerings; the level of engagement demonstrated by their fans; how fast a company’s site has grown; and how creatively the companies are using their Facebook presence, as evaluated by a distinguished panel of outside judges.

Overall, we believe our methodology is sound and fair. But any time you generate a list, there are caveats. We had to make some category choices that could be debated. For example, the results would look a bit different if we treated band and musician fan pages as promotions for their labels. The chief reasons we didn’t do that are: 1) Not many music fans have any real awareness of labels, and Facebook fan pages do little to change that; and 2) many music fan pages are created organically by Facebook users and reflect little to no coordination by the labels. Should the latter situation change in future years, we’d reconsider. (Don’t agree with our methodology? Log on to The Big Money’s Facebook page, and tell us how you’d do it differently.)

That raises an even more fundamental question: In the context of Facebook, what exactly constitutes a company? A few of the brands on this list are owned by the same parent firm; both Mountain Dew (No. 18) and Gatorade (No. 45), for example, are divisions of PepsiCo. After much debate, we decided to separate out brands, for two principal reasons: First, imagine a huge multibrand company like Viacom. One of its brands, MTV (No. 41), is very popular on Facebook, but most of the rest are close to nonexistent; it seems distorting to give the entire company credit. Second, to the extent that corporate entities are succeeding in building an audience on Facebook, it is almost always at the individual brand level rather than at the corporate level, and so it seems appropriate to reflect that in our rankings.