In the spirit of sharing things I like on the web, check out the video below about social media usage.

Read the blog post behind the video on socialnomics.net.

[digg=http://digg.com/business_finance/Expectations_of_Facebook_Marketing]Clients interested in social media marketing are almost always interested in what they can do on Facebook. And it’s understandable why; users spend hours each week looking at pictures and interacting with friends. When discussing Facebook marketing, it is important to have reasonable expectations about what is possible and what is most likely to happen, given your client’s requests. When putting together a Facebook marketing plan, below are a few things you should and shouldn’t expect.

Expect:

• Expect to do a lot of audience research if you want good results building an application.
• Expect negative reactions if you decide to send out mass messages to random people or you are making a lot of random friend requests. Facebook could suspend your account if you do this. Conversely, you should try posting videos, notes and pictures and allow people to look at what they find most interesting.
• If you build an application, expect to have to put in some time promoting it before it promotes itself.
• Expect a lot to your application usage growth to come from friends inviting other friends and news feed notices going out showing that someone has added or utilized part of an application.
• Expect that you should to utilize other social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Digg, and blogs to achieve the greatest results.

Don’t expect:

• Don’t expect people to become fans of your brand or business, just because you created a page.
• Don’t expect people to put a great deal of time and effort into conversation with your brand, unless they are uniquely touched or are passionate about your company.
• Don’t expect great results, if you aren’t doing anything that brings value or entertainment to the end user.
• Don’t expect a lot of people to click on your ads if you are simply looking for brand awareness. Offering an incentive or posting a low price for a product will most of the time increase your click through rate.
• If you build an application, don’t expect users to tell friends on their own. It’s best to have sharing built into the application.
• Don’t expect a great campaign to last forever.

Please feel free share any tips or advice if you think I may have forgot any. Additionally, here are some more great resources to check out:

The Top Five Viral Facebook Techniques – AllFacebook.com

Facebook Developers Network – Facebook.com

A Failed Facebook Marketing Campaign (About Walmart) – Social Media Optimization Blog

Facebook Marketing Stunt Backfires – Marketing Pilgrim

From the makers of Website Grader, comes Facebook Grader – an application that measures your reach and authority on Facebook. Not that I scored horribly, but I think this is a hilarious measurement made for older social media marketers who want to see how popular they think they are.

A Facebook power user doesn’t care about their reach and authority within a group of fake friends. Most power users care about keeping in touch with real friends, sharing real things and of course snooping on other people’s business.

I’m actually a fan of HubSpot’s Website Grader, but I don’t necessarily see the point of Facebook Grader as a measurement of a user’s authority. I would however take it more seriously if it measured the reach and authority of a Facebook Application.

Now that I’ve bashed Facebook Grader from the 25-year-old Male perspective, it’s actually a really smart marketing idea for Hubspot. The application is good link bait and will attract the older marketers who are clueless enough about social media marketing that they will actually use it and perhaps consult with HubSpot. Mashable didn’t think it was so bad either. What do you think?

BTW: I got a 77.

Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice Facebook App

Burger King, home of the flame broiled Whopper, has recently launched yet another unique, edgy, marketing campaign. The brand that brings you The (creepy) King, meat smelling body spray, and many other odd, attention grabbing campaigns, is at it again. The Whopper Sacrifice is a new Facebook application that provides users with a coupon for a free Whooper, if the user is willing to sacrifice 10 friends from his/her Facebook account.

There has been a lot of negative feedback on this campaign, citing the fact that it encourages users to exhibit anti-social behavior on a platform fueled by social connections. Many bloggers are shocked that Burger King would launch an application that doesn’t make friends, but instead creates potential enemies. Good or bad, it certainly got a lot of press.

Which is exactly why this is a brilliant campaign – it is a unique idea, funny, and it has sparked a lot of attention and discussion. It has all the ingredients for a successful campaign: the brand is getting a ton of exposure and it is driving users to a measurable, revenue driving (most will buy a soda and/or fries), event when customers visit to Burger King to redeem the coupon.  Not to mention it is  accomplishing what all marketers hope and wish for, it has gone viral.

To those that argue that it is damaging to the brand, you are taking this campaign way too seriously. Facebook users have plenty of pseudo-friends and are easily able to remove “friends” without damaging any real/online relationships, this is simply a funny way of cleaning up a friend’s list. Also, the fact that people will actually go through with this shows that the Whopper must be THAT good, right?

Although a great campaign, it could certainly be improved. Sure, this was pretty viral, getting over 15,000 users in its first day, but Burger King missed an opportunity by not having a way to encourage users to invite friends to add the application. This could have been accomplished through a feature to get free fries by having enough “true friends” identify a certain user’s friendship as being worth more than a Whopper.

Another fun idea to improve on the idea would be to add a level of competitiveness to the application, like awarding the Whopper’s biggest fan, the user willing to sacrifice the most friends, with free Whopper’s for a year.

Overall, great idea, very good execution.