Facebook Marketing For Dummies Review

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(More customer reviews)I normally adore Dummies books. I have several of them on my shelves. Facebook Marketing for Dummies is the first in the Dummies series that I did NOT like enthusiastically. I really feel this book is not up to the Dummies standard of helpfulness.
First, this book is supposed to be about MARKETING - but over half the book is about the very basics of Facebook. There are plenty of other books out there on how to use Facebook - including one by the Dummies group! It seems silly for this book on marketing to rehash the existing information and spend so much time on things covered elsewhere. It means that only a small portion of what remains is actually helpful information on Marketing.
They cover a few basics about the areas of Facebook to use for marketing - how a fan page is better than a regular "personal" account because a person can only have 5,000 friends while a fan page is completely unlimited. Fan pages are also "anonymous" - while a group makes it clear which person is the administrator, with a fan page the administrator is private. So you can run a fan page for your company or project without worrying about people tracking down and bugging your personal account.
But in terms of actual MARKETING information, the pickings are very slim. They tell you to post relevant info onto your account. Was anyone really going to post a lot of IRrelevant information? They say to post enough to keep people interested, but not so much that you bombard your users with too many messages. But they don't provide any examples or information to help newbies get a feel for which numbers fall into which ranges! They tell you not to use a "hard sell" and turn off people - but again, no examples, no further information.
In terms of drawing in visitors, they focus primarily on paying Facebook to use their ad system, and that's about it. They mention putting a Facebook tag in your email and on your site, and again, that's it. That's all you are learning about marketing your Facebook fan page?
There's an entire section on pushing contests - about how you can do them with random winners, or with the judging of submissions, and how this is great for traffic building. But NOWHERE in that entire section do they even mention legalities of doing all of this! How about the legalities of taking personal information from winners who are under the age of 13? How about the legalities of having a winner who hails from South Africa or other countries which have strict rules about entering online contests? Some countries have quite serious penalties for companies who offer contests and sweepstakes to "their residents" without doing legal paperwork first! It was completely shocking to me that a book in the Dummies series would offer seriously flawed legal advice like this.
In their "why do marketing on Facebook" section, one of their top ten reasons is "to run promotions for fans". This doesn't make sense to me. This is one of the things you use Facebook FOR but it's not a reason TO have a Facebook account. Reasons are things like "to get a higher ranking in Google" or "to get free word-of-mouth mentions by people in Facebook's network". It's as if they ran out of real reasons and they had to stick something in there to fill out the top 10 list.
When they finally hit issues which ARE important in Facebook marketing - like dealing with irate fans posting on your public business area, there is hardly a few lines dedicated to the topic. If anything, this is the sort of thing that the book should be covering in great detail.
And how about their commandment of "don't drink and Facebook"?? I run a wine site! My wine site page is ALL about drinking wine, and that is what all the members do. Many of them come online when they're drinking wine and we discuss what we're drinking. If what the book was trying to say is "don't post when you're drunk" then that is a COMPLETELY different issue and one they should have been more clear about.
I just can't state how disappointed I was with this book. Looking at other reviews on Amazon, it seems like half of them were primarily swayed by a "$50 Facebook ad credit" they got - but I don't see that credit ANYWHERE in my book. I even went back and re-read the entire Marketing chapter to see if I missed it somewhere. I still can't find a free credit. If it's in here somewhere, they didn't make it very obvious.
Not recommended. You could get far more out of their regular Marketing book, and simply apply that great knowledge to the Facebook world.
UPDATE: I talked directly with the "Dummies" publishers. The book currently DOES NOT HAVE ANY GIFT AD CREDIT. So if you are buying the book based on those "ad credit" promotions on Amazon, you will NOT GET IT.

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Discover how to leverage the power of the Facebook community to achieve your business marketing goals
Facebook boasts an extremely devoted user base, with more than 65 billion page visits per month. With Facebook, an organization can market and promote their brand, products, or services via the network's built-in components of profile pages, polls, community building, advertising, word-of-mouth marketing, and business applications. This insightful resource focuses on the strategies, tactics, and techniques necessary to lead your organization into the world of Facebook marketing.
Packed with vital real-world case studies, the book serves as a must-have guide for the most reliable, responsible, and ethical business and marketing practices with Facebook.
A helpful reference that discusses essential strategies, tactics, and techniques for excelling in the world of Facebook marketing
Examines setting up a business profile page, hosting an event on Facebook, and tracking your return-on-investment
Shares strategies for successful Facebook advertising campaigns
Demonstrates how to create widgets and Facebook applications

Face it: this essential book contains everything you need to know for your foray into Facebook marketing.
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

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Facebook Advertising For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) Review

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(More customer reviews)The Good:
Facebook Advertising for Dummies was written by Paul Dunay, Richard Kreuger, and Joel Elad, who I'd never heard of before, but that doesn't mean they're not reputable experts -- after all, I'm sure they've never heard of me.
And the book is formatted and structured just as every other Dummies book, so if you've read one before, you'll know how to get to what you need.
Now the question for a book like this is: is it worth the $30 Canadian? And there's no way to say it's not. Facebook ads are one of the things that the Zuggernaut has gotten right (there's no need to enumerate what it's got wrong here), and they represent a cost-effective way for businesses and groups of all sizes to access online advertising in an easy, powerful way.
Facebook Advertising for Dummies gives you a practical and commonsense guide to using ads on Facebook. Some of the things that I think are particularly useful in the book:
* how to design and optimize your ads
* how to test ads before launching a campaign
* how to integrate Facebook ads into your overall marketing strategy
* how to manage multiple campaigns
* how to work with the copious data that Facebook provides on ad performance
The Bad & The Ugly:
Overall, the book is a super resource, plainly written (which is a compliment) and useful. For me, the section that was least useful was how to design landing pages in Facebook. While I could likely figure out how to use FBML, I don't see that happening any time soon. Most of the time, someone better with code than I would be designing the landing pages (if the ads were going to point people to Facebook pages).
There's a lot of resource here, and it would likely be especially useful for small businesses or not-for-profits that want to get online but don't have an agency or money to spend on consultants. However, I suspect that as a PR guy who sometimes recommends that consulting clients use Facebook ads, I'll be continuing to refer to this book in time to come. Unless, that is, Facebook changes the way things are done. In which case I really will look like a dummy. And not the good kind.


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Profitable ideas and techniques for advertising on Facebook
Tap into the explosive growth of social media and reach your customers with effective Facebook advertising campaigns and savvy insights into how to use this social media phenomenon effectively. It's all here and more in this detailed, easy-to-follow guide from two award-winning marketers. You'll learn what makes a good Facebook ad, how to apply the latest strategies and tactics for effective pay-per-click and cost-per-impression advertising, how to test your ad results, and much more.
Explores Facebook advertising inside and out; there are now more than 400 million active Facebook users and over 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
Works as an all-around, hands-on guide for both experienced and new Facebook advertisers
Walks you through planning and creating an advertising campaign
Explains writing effective ad copy, how to use landing pages, and how to test and optimize your ads
Shows you how to use Facebook Insights to understand your results and how to create reports that analyze data

Put your company's best face forward with the sound advertising tips and techniques in Facebook Advertising For Dummies.

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Marketing in the Moment: The Practical Guide to Using Web 3.0 Marketing to Reach Your Customers First Review

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(More customer reviews)I found reading this book like sipping a frothy latte, enjoyable but light and when it's gone, it's gone. I picked up some tips, but I found this book much more oriented towards speculative strategic thinking than practical tactics.
The book's core argument, that we're moving away from "open" web platforms that don't have much privacy or filtering, towards "closed" ones, was a useful insight for me. I don't disagree with his core premise about user behavior. But I roll my eyes when social media marketing is presented as other than labor-intensive and thus costly. The argument that just because you can use Facebook to market your business for free does not make marketing on Facebook free. The author, like many social media writers, kind of ignores the time-intensity of using guerilla tactics in social media.
Some web users barely use a search engine at all, which is the "open" web. They may spend all their time on closed platforms such as virtual reality games, Facebook, and especially platforms that work well with little mobile devices. It's a shift in user habits that is very real and it means that your future customers are going to find you inside those closed platforms, not by using the search engines. I was really impressed by the thinking on this and I think he's right about it.
That said, in the chapters of the book that cover specific types of platforms the author enthuses too much about what's great about the platform but doesn't adequately (in my opinion) address the costs of entering these new advertising and engagement media. Like many social media enthusiasts he seems to feel we should just jump into all of it with both feet. The problem is the labor-intensity of learning to adapt and the grunt work of building presences within these new platforms. Obviously we're going to have to choose a few and ignore the rest, but the author's enthusiasm for all the new platforms means that if you follow his advice you'll be buried up to your neck in new websites to join and explore.
The author addresses our concerns at the start: that social media marketing can be a big time and resource waster. He promises that he'll show us ways to always come out ahead and get maximum bang for our buck. I didn't feel he made good on the promise though.
While the book offers a lot of practical tips, the author is most interested in internet trends towards what he calls Web 3.0. He's speculating as to which media channels may get big and important. In his enthusiasm for all the new toys, I found his arguments for using these new tools became ungrounded. While the book does contain some practical advice for using things like Twitter and texting, it also ventures into areas of marketing in the new media, such as virtual reality worlds, where you would have to have staff investing tremendous amounts of time learning the platforms and networking within them.
The author's inspirations are billion-dollar companies like Zappos. These businesses have the resources to put full-time staff on projects like building a presence in "Second Life" and the 20-odd other virtual reality sites he reals off as worth investigating. I'm happy for the author that he gets to mastermind massive campaigns in these new media and direct his scores of virtual employees, but as a practical matter I found many of the tactics suggested in the book pretty impractical for a business without deep pockets.
I found a few tips I could use. The book is nicely designed and the author has a breezy prose voice. While reading I was excited about some of the methods described so I signed-up for a SecondLife account to check it out. I encountered an environment that clearly has a massive learning curve. If you had an employee or two on staff who already enjoyed virtual reality worlds, they'd learn faster I suppose - but as a solo-preneur and marketing consultant, I'm just too busy with everything I'm already doing to invest my time learning platforms that basically amount to playing with virtual paper dolls

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"With the rapid change for marketers and businesses, knowing the right thing to do is a must. It's do or die. Marketing in the Moment gives the reader the right tools to win and now!"--Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak, author of The Mirror Test"The online marketing world is changing fast, and nobody knows for sure what's coming next. This book can help you be better prepared for the changes that are already afoot."--Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, author of Delivering Happiness"Why go to an expensive Internet marketing course when everything you need for Web 3.0 is right here? With Internet marketing growing by leaps and bounds, it might seem difficult to keep up. But after reading Tasner's book, learning his many easy-to-learn practical strategies, I'm ready to conquer the Internet. I strongly recommend this book."--Joseph Sugarman, Chairman of BluBlocker Corporation, author of Advertising Secrets of the Written Word"This powerful book is loaded with great ideas to help you attract more customers and make more sales--immediately!"--Brian Tracy, author of The Art of Closing the Sale"If you cannot generate money online after implementing the realistic insights and strategies revealed in Tasner's book, Marketing in the Moment, then throw in the towel--game over!"--Joel Bauer, author, speaker, and mentorWith the explosion in Web, mobile, and social media marketing channels, you have an extraordinary array of new marketing options to choose from. Which ones work? How do you make them work--without wasting a fortune on trial and error? Get this book, that's how! Top Web marketing consultant Michael Tasner has written the definitive practical guide to driving maximum value from next-generation Web, online, mobile, and social marketing. Drawing from his innovative marketing techniques, Tasner has written the first book on Web 3.0 marketing. Tasner helps marketers, entrepreneurs, and managers move beyond hype and high-level strategy to proven tactics and successful ground-level execution. You'll discover which new marketing technologies deliver the best results and which hardly ever pay for themselves...how to use virtual collaboration to accomplish marketing projects faster and at lower cost...how to build realistic, practical action plans for the next three months, six months, and twelve months. Whatever you sell, wherever you compete, no matter how large or small your company is, this book will help you build leads, traffic, sales, market share--and profits! Capitalizing on the new "content marketing"The megashift from blogging to microblogging--and what it means to you

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