Review of Facebook Marketing book that I recently finished.

Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook’s Features for Your Marketing Campaigns, Third Edition

By: Brian Carter and Justin Levy

Published in December of 2011 by Que Publishing

            This book is built around marketing yourself or your business in Facebook. Whether you are new to Facebook, or have been on it for years (like I have), you can almost certainly find something you didn’t know about. The first couple of chapters focus on getting an account started and learning the basics of how to work with Facebook, as well as all of the security and privacy settings for an individual profile/account. Experienced users are likely to already know most of this, which may provide for a somewhat boring read, but I would encourage everyone to still read through this anyway. I can almost guarantee that there will be something you didn’t know in those chapters.

             Chapter 3 is where it really started getting interesting for me. This chapter focused around public “pages” and “groups” as a way to create a presence on Facebook. Many companies and celebrities use pages to help promote themselves and their company. It goes over all of the different options available on pages and groups, and how each of them could be used.

            The second major section of the book is chapters 4-6. These chapters are all focused on actual marketing by using Facebook. These chapters discuss Facebook’s own targeted advertising platform, analytic tools to determine the success of your advertising, and the capability of building a community of fans or customers that revolves around your service or product.

            The next section of the book is about the advanced features that can be used to further your presence on Facebook even more. Some of these features include creating a “place” on Facebook for people to check in when they visit your establishment, using social plugins to enhance your page and potentially any external site it might be linked to, and Facebook credits. The credits can be an interesting way to generate revenue through Facebook, depending on what your business actually is.

            Chapter 10 is a series of examples of celebrities and/or companies that have done their Facebook pages very well, and is a great chapter to look at if you need some ideas for things you can do on your own page. Chapter 11, which is the last chapter of the book, is the authors’ personal views on where Facebook is headed and what new things may be in store in the near future.

            As someone who is hoping to eventually become a freelance web designer, knowing how to market myself is going to be a must. This book was extremely insightful and taught me a lot about using a platform I am already familiar with, to accomplish this goal. I think this book is a must read for anyone who is running a business, big or small, and is looking to expand further. Even if you already have a presence on Facebook, this book could likely teach you things that you didn’t know, and may end up improving your presence and reach even further, as well as allowing you to fine tune the strategies you already use on the internet.