After watching the too much bloated movie on Facebook’s beginnings, I had the impression that to be a successful web-entrepreneur you have to be either a total nerd or the luckiest guy around, not having a clue on how and if that “Facebook” is a real business or not.
Then I had the chance to review Zarrellas’ “The Facebook Marketing Book” which finally helped me finding out. It is not a silly attempt to create an interesting history from a dull money-making one, as the movie is, but rather a clean and practical way to learn what can be done with Facebook in order to perform a good Web 2.0 marketing attempt. A word of advice though: no magical recipes are going to be found here, any marketing effort just gets as good as the persons doing it.
The book is a very easy reading: each topic covered has an accompanying screenshot of real life Facebook’s examples, which gives also some hints on what companies to follow or “mimic” when doing your own marketing efforts. The book covers in 12 chapters the main aspects of Facebook: Profiles, Pages, Groups, Events, Analytics… etc. After reading each chapter a clear idea is obtained of what the purpose of each of those elements is in Facebook’s world, when, how and what for they can be used. And upon closing the book I really think I now understand where the money in Facebook can be found and why so many companies are there trying to get as many “Fans” as possible.
There are a couple things missing on the book that I would have really love to have found included, and thus my rating of it doesn’t get too high:
- First, nowhere in the book I found a good basic guide of a Web 2.0 marketing campaign using Facebook. A chapter covering a simple “how to” once all the main Facebook’s components have been explained would have really rounded up the book, even considering that there’s no “one size fits all” advice. But given that the book seems to have been thought as a “newbies” guide into Facebook’s marketing, I missed this.
- Second, I found that the Application devoted chapter was too bleak not giving too much value on how to actually program those apps. Ok, this is a marketing focused book and it does actually talk about what can be done with Facebook apps so as to get more “marketing revenue” so, well, I cannot really complain about this. But being the IT kind of guy that likes trying everything, I missed it, just a bit.
All in all, a good reading which doesn’t require a big effort to get through, gives a good bunch of good advices and examples and can give you a good idea of what really is that Facebook about (the money, that is!).
The book is here http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449388485/