Book Review: The Like Economy

The Like Economy, by Brian Carter is subtitled "How Businesses Make Money with Facebook." The crux of the book is that if you build a relevant fan base of those who are open to your message, then craft your message appropriately for conversions, you can drive sales of your product or service.

While this book had a huge focus on Facebook advertising (I felt a bit like I was in a 250-page sales pitch to use Facebook advertising), the book did have some fascinating statistics on Facebook, great advice on analytics and measurement, interesting comparisons of Facebook to email and Twitter, several general marketing 101 pointers, and a lot of ideas and direction on content generation. And all of this stuff made the Facebook advertising selling parts of the book tolerable.The bottom line: you can get as many fans as you want through advertising on Facebook, but they won't see your posts if you don't deliver engaging content from the first day they fan your page. And here is why:

• If you don't get your fans to like and comment on your posts, they'll stop seeing them in their news feeds due to Facebook's EdgeRank system.
• Most fans never return to a page after they like it.
• Most posts by pages are seen by less than 10% of their fans.
• Many fans will never see your welcome tab.
• When fans create new posts on your Facebook page, other fans don't see them.
• Posts from pages with 10,000 fans reach 30-40% of their fans.
• Posts from pages with 100,000 fans reach 20-30% of their fans.
• Posts from pages with 1,000,000 or more fans reach 10% of their fans.
• The 1% Rule: only 1% of people will do what you ask them to do online.

I recommend picking up the book to learn more about how to use Facebook as a marketing tool, though I don't necessarily agree that Facebook advertising is the only way to drive fan "likes" to your business pages.