Book review: Facebook Marketing by Justin Levy

The short version: If you’ve never used Facebook, at all, or if you’ve used it as a consumer and have no idea what a Page is, this book could help.

Nice appetizers

The book starts with the obligatory “Here’s where Facebook came from”. Useful if you’re dipping your toe in the water for the first time. After that, it walks you through creating a profile, then Pages and Groups, then using Facebook Connect.
It winds up with a tour of a few ‘best in class’ pages as examples, and a quick, very high-level glance at where Facebook may go next.

Again, if you have no clue about Facebook, this will be a helpful read.

No meat

The problem is, it goes no further. I would’ve liked at least a little how to go with some of the features discussions. For example: Justin Levy briefly mentions you can integrate Facebook’s live feed with ‘live chat’. But he never mentions the Open Stream API itself, how you would do the integration, or where the live chat comes from.

Without that information, a marketer new to Facebook would be left floundering, trying to figure out the tools that were used to create feed-plus-chat combination Levy cites.

You’ll be hungry later

So, by all means, read this book as a great overview of all current Facebook features. But understand that you’ll have to do more reading after: Facebook Marketing tells you, the marketer, what you can do, but not how to do it.