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Book Review: “The Facebook Marketing Book”

I joined LinkedIn way back in 2005. I started this blog in October 2006. I was on Twitter early enough that the handle ‘paulrjones’ was still available. In fact, it was so soon after it went live that the early adopters… tip of the hat to Jason Alba … who turned me onto it were using Twitter to enable lunchtime meetups.

My LinkedIn account was half-finished for years before I could imagine any value in completing it. The blog paid off right away, but the value of Twitter puzzled me for months after I started using it.

I’ve known about Facebook since the time when it was still limited to college-aged students. I joined Facebook pretty early, too. But I doubt if there’s anyone with the reach of these words that uses Facebook less than me. Simply put, Facebook leaves me cold.

And that’s a problem for a marketer, because Facebook is close to being a marketer’s… and a cause marketer’s… dream.

That’s why I was so glad when the friendly folks at O’Reilly, the tech publishers (et al), sent me a review copy of The Facebook Marketing Book, by Dan Zarrella and Allison Zarrella.

The Facebook Marketing Book is arranged almost as picture book with long captions. As you open a page spread on the left hand side is a screen grab or a graphic. On the right are two or three or four paragraphs of explanatory text.

Ambrose Bierce, the acid-tongued satirist and author of The Devil’s Dictionary once reviewed a book by writing, “the covers of this book are too far apart.” Ouch!

But the covers aren’t too far apart here. The arrangement and brevity of the book is actually a selling point for me. Any more and I’d have never gotten through it.

The Facebook Marketing Book is like eating a fancy cupcake; there’s enough to satisfy, but not too much to lead to diminishing returns. And anyone who watched Brendan Frasier in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” knows what I mean by diminishing returns.

Since almost everything in the book was new to me, I’m not sure what bon mots from the book to share with you my faithful readers. The pages on how to use keywords in Facebook for SEO struck me as important. I appreciated the discussion on when to use Facebook Pages, when to use Profiles and when to choose Groups. The pages in chapter 10 on promotions were pithy and helpful. Chapter 12 on analytics and ROI gave me an idea about this blog.

If, like me, you’re a rookie on marketing with Facebook, The Facebook Marketing Book is a nice bite-sized introduction.

Here are the chapter titles:
  1. Introduction to Social Networking
  2. Facebook Profile Basics
  3. Facebook Page Basics
  4. Facebook Group Basics
  5. Facebook Events
  6. Facebook Application Basics
  7. Customizing Your Facebook Page
  8. Developing a Facebook Content Strategy
  9. Cross-Promoting Content on Facebook
  10. Facebook Page Management
  11. Advertising on Facebook
  12. Analytics and ROI
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