Are you into Social Media Marketing? Want to go beyond Social Media overview and get your hands dirty with ‘on-ground’ hacks and processes?

“Building Facebook Fandom” is an eBook that might help you get an overview of what works inside the walled gardens of Facebook.

Afternote: Just got notified that It will be available in a few days- but you could register at the site now to receive it later.

Written by Ryan Lim of Blugrapes marketing, the ebook is about how to utilize Facebook to the maximum for marketing advantage. Of course, the ebook serves as a marketing material for their services- but I have always believed that giving something of value to your audience always works as a win win.

I had met Ryan earlier and he discussed about his eBook. The subject is topical- given the volume of conversations around this topic, and there is surely some interest from agency guys- media planners and account executives alike.

Another good thing is that some observations apply to all the social media platforms. The Facebook platform has its own nuances and restrictions. And for anyone attempting to undertake a marketing exercise, it would make a huge difference really understanding the medium.

The eBook is free (as I mentioned earlier, BluGrapes specialize around Facebook- so this also serves as marketing material for them- this is what I call germFeed) to download as pdf from this site

It is an easy read for those looking at harnessing the power of Social Media marketing (I call it Social Reference Marketing)- specially Facebook.

As a critic, I expected the book to be more visual (with more images/screenshots) and feel that it could have been much more impactful if the content delivery was through video. I have one such video demonstrating the nuances here.

But then again- this is short, handy and written in easy prose. So if you are someone concerned with utilizing FaceBook as a platform to build a community (a fan page or a group) or for reaching out to your TG (Social Ads), some tips can be quite useful.

Some handy tips pointers and my critique from the ebook (available here for download as a pdf):

• Ad fatigue: 2 weeks is a good time to refresh your Social Ads. After this, the ads might start getting fatigued (I would have loved to see some real life examples or case studies supporting this fact)
• The right threshold for viral?: To achieve the viral effect, scale itself is important. On Facebook, a 1000 member fan base could be the magic number before you start going really viral
• Social Proof: People are more likely to be a fan of your page if 4 of their friends are already fans of your page (no examples – but seems they have arrived at this figure using some of their previous campaign analysis)
• Day parting: Best timings for your status updates? Very interesting stuff from an operations perspective- though not with numbers to boot. This attempts to look at which is the time of the day that the users are most likely to receive your status message.

Enjoy!

Shalabh

PS: I am not related or affiliated to BluGrapes and this is not a incentivized plug. I am happy to receive and disseminate such information and material for all the readers, inspite of this being marketing material.

I am putting together a resources section on the site- and will hopefully have more such content on the site. Keep watching this space.