Comments about O'Reilly Media The Facebook Marketing Book:

The Facebook Marketing Book is an invaluable tool for the social media driven workplace. O'Reilly's latest marketing guide to the popular website is full of insightful ideas for marketers, salespeople, and managers to maximize the potential of Facebook's ubiquitous online presence. Dan Zarrella and Alison Zarrella clearly illustrate the basics of the website's functionality and goals in the first few chapters. The latter half of the book gives more advanced direction and suggestions for page owners to increase page views and likes, engage customers, and leverage feedback.

Illustrations and graphs of facebook user data are throughout the book to give perspective of the popularity of the Facebook platform since it's inception.

Brands, services, famous people, organizations and other public facing entities are encouraged to set up a Facebook Page, separate from personal profiles. You are encouraged to take advantage of the various customization features available, as well as to add relevant applications to your page. Some valuable and not so obvious suggestions regarding vanity URLs and profile completion are suggested for both beginning and advanced administrators.

Facebook groups are addressed in Chapter 4. Groups differ from pages in the way the interact with members versus fans. Honestly, after marketing with Facebook for a few years now, Dan and Alison do the best job of differentiating these types of web pages and the pros and cons of each.

Facebook event invites are polluting inboxes daily, and for good reason! As someone who hosts a variety of events any given year, Chapter 5's tips on promoting an event or sale on Facebook are wonderful. Don't forget to invite your friends and share events on your own personal wall!

More experienced marketers will benefit largely from the concluding chapters of the book regarding strategy, effective timing and keywords, and engagement with customers by sharing. Breaking down these key concepts are critical to running an effective marketing campaign but are also quite fun once you can drill down to this level of detail. Advertising and metrics on who is viewing your page are covered in Chapters 11 and 12. Make use of this data or at least be aware of the data to continue to enlighten your fans and customers as Facebook is becoming a prevalent website for most computer users worldwide.

This book was an easy to digest and clear guide to marketing via Facebook. This is something that O'Reilly does very well, and I look forward to reading more books from Dan and Alison Zarella.

Full Disclosure: I received the eBook downloads for review purposes.

Comments about O'Reilly Media The Facebook Marketing Book:

When I started reading this book I had something different in mind. Coming from a marketing background and being a heavy social media user, I was looking for a book with great Facebook tips. This book does not do that; yet, it is a great book if you start working on Facebook marketing.The Facebook Marketing Book, by Dan Zarella and Alison Zarella, acts as the foundation for your Facebook marketing strategy. Everything, including Profiles, Pages, Groups, Events are described extensively and, although I am not a fan of that, I have to agree that they are extremely useful for an average social media user.Then, you have the second part - now we move on to the kind of knowledge needed for a social media marketer, which is the part that interests me most. And here you have the book's weak point. Some chapters are really interesting, yet are covered in so few pages. ROI and especially analytics are things that every marketer should know, and there's no detail on that (let alone Facebook analytics and their integration to Google analytics, which is one of the most valuable things for marketers).Summarizing: the book is a great starting point. It contains all the basic knowledge you need (you can understand it even if you've started using Facebook 2 weeks ago) plus some extra tips that will help you through your first steps into the world of Facebook. However, if you look for some pro knowledge, you will have to go online after you read this book and search for more. But that's fair - you don't expect to get full knowledge of a [$] trend in less than 300 pages.

Comments about O'Reilly Media The Facebook Marketing Book:

This book can be used as a guide to using the power of Facebook, the network originally made for select college students, then expanded to larger networks of high schools and colleges, then larger networks of people, and finally becoming today's huge network of more than 500 million active users around the world, to make it work for the benefit of your company.
It describes and explains all the marketing tools that exist in Facebook, like pages, events, ads, applications, which anyone can easily and cost effectively use, for promoting their business.

The book is written in simple English language, that I very much appreciated because English is not my mother tongue. It is a book that can easily be read by people who are not technically oriented, and who are not professionals either in computers or in marketing. Yet all can have a benefit from reading it.

It is well formatted in twelve chapters, each chapter consisting of several units, and a number of screen shots. However screen shots are not enough or very well positioned in the book, and sometimes I had to go to Facebook itself to fully understand the subject and see more examples.

Another strong point of the book is its down to earth approach of using Facebook as a marketing tool. The writer does not claim that Facebook marketing tools are the magic solution to every marketing problem, but explains the "laws", and the inherent logic, that runs Facebook, so that the user can take them into consideration in designing their marketing campaign. I believe this is the stronger point of the book, although in some cases more examples may be needed, for to take the full advantage of the tool.

Finally, a weak point of the book is chapter 12, Analytics and ROI. I would like to see more detailed information of how to use those tools, because statistics are very important to marketing planning. Though, it may be out of the scope of this book, to go in depth in fields that should be supported by Facebook documentation.

Generally speaking the book is very good and it gives a sound foundation to anyone who wants to build their marketing campaign using Facebook tools.

Disclosure: I received a free ebook copy for review purposes.

Comments about O'Reilly Media The Facebook Marketing Book:

The Facebook Marketing Book
by Dan Zarrella & Alison Zarrella

The Facebook Marketing Book is an overview of the tools available for marketing on the Facebook social networking site. The book does a good job of touching on the various features that are geared toward business and differentiates how these tools compare to their individual user counterparts. If you are wondering how Facebook marketing works, this book will provide some insight. It is not a comprehensive marketing manual.

The book is easy to read and has a lot of screen shots from the actual Facebook web site. Some seem to represent the text well while others seem a bit disjointed and lacking enough supporting documentation to make them useful.

The book gives some tips and examples on how Fackbook features can be used for your marketing message. It does a good job of trying to convince the reader that Facebook is an interactive rather than broadcast medium.

Readers seeking an overview of the Facebook marketing environment will find the book useful. Consider this book to be more of a guided tour of the Facebook marketing environment rather than a nuts and bolts dissection of how, why and if one should be marketing on Facebook.

Disclosure: I received a free ebook copy for review purposes.