The following is a review of The Facebook Marketing Book, published also on the WebMarCom blog.
Facebook is an important part of a business social media marketing
strategy. With over 500 million users, many of them active, understanding the tools and features is critical to a marketing initiative. The Facebook Marketing Book
When I found out the book was co-authored by Dan Zarrella, I had to read it. Dan Zarrella, a ‘social media scientist’ with Hubspot, has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CNN and the New York Times for his insights into the science behind viral marketing, and adoption of social media. I’m a Hubspot partner and have enjoyed reading the studies and articles that Dan publishes. Alison, Dan’s wife, is noted as a Social Media Expert, and has written blogs for Mashable. She is an interactive copywriter and social media manager and has worked with some major companies on social media campaigns. In the book, Dan and Alison Zarrella share tactics, setting campaign goals, ideas to utilize Facebook features as well as thoughts on how to approach measuring the results of the campaign with key performance indicators (KPIs).
I found the book to be an interesting guide to the features of Facebook, and a good overview. If you seek a guide on implementing FBML (Facebook Markup Language) or how to create a Facebook page, this is not the right source. However, if you are new to Facebook and want to understand what a Group is versus a Business Page, this book will answer these questions for you.
As a follower of Dan Zarrella, I was hopeful that the book would offer insights on the types of campaigns that get more traction, or a scientific analysis of which keywords command more “likes”. There’s a scattering of this information, but it’s not in-depth, nor is it the significant focus of this book. Some of the findings revealed about Facebook were not particularly revealing. For example:
- Facebook has a more mainstream audience than Twitter
- Facebook users are not all social media geeks
- Facebook readers stay away from flowery language
- Facebook users like sharing stories about sex.
The authors do qualify this last finding:
“Facebook users like sharing stories about sex. If you’re feeling daring, go ahead and try to write something scandalous. For most marketers, however, this is not practical advice.”
Easy to read, with lots of screen shots, The Facebook Marketing Book makes a nice general reference. Guidelines like posting relevant information often and creating a content calendar are nice reminder to online marketers who are already immersed in Facebook. Especially for adding SEO rules to Facebook, The Facebook Marketing Book has some nice tips, like using your Page name, URL and Info Box for keywords. Ideas like linking interaction to prizes are excellent suggestions.
Bottom line – Although it’s not an in-depth analysis of how to get traction with your marketing campaign using Facebook, The Facebook Marketing Book is a great overview of the features that you will find on Facebook today that can be used for Business marketing.
Disclosure: The Facebook Marketing Book is published by O’Reilly and I received a free copy for review.
About Jody Raines
