The Anatomy of Facebook

Until you actually join Facebook and play with it a little, it can be hard to figure out what’s so appealing about it. Some stories in the media make it sound like the hottest hipster fad since the invention of the black turtleneck, while others portray it as a cross between an opium den and a shark-infested lagoon. So you put off signing up for a while, wondering: What could possess otherwise sane people to sit hunched over their computers all day, posting photos, playing word games, and sending each other imaginary cupcakes or pictures of cute animals? What could possibly make a website so addictive that its members refer to it as “crack book”? To me, the answer is simple: Facebook does a better job of connecting you with your friends, and keeping you in touch with each other, than any invention since Alexander Graham Bell first crank-called Watson. You can think of Facebook as the online dashboard for your social life: a centralized display that gives you up-to-the minute data on what your friends are up to, what’s on their minds, and what they’re planning for the weekend. But there are a couple of other levels to its appeal, too. In addition to strengthening social connections, Facebook gives you a set of power- full and versatile tools for sharing news, information, and ideas—not just with your own friends, but with the larger social network they connect to. In a sense, Facebook is like having your own personal broadcast network. That’s the real reason why, with more than half a billion members and still growing, Facebook has rapidly become the new town square—the place where people gather to discuss the news of the day and spread the word about everything from new music, books, and movies to grass-roots political causes. And finally, Facebook’s sharing tools give you an inexpensive yet highly effective way to promote whatever creative, professional, or business projects you may have cooking. If you’ve got a band, a theater company, a coffeehouse, a graphic design business, or anything else you want to promote, this book will tell you how to set up official Facebook Pages to find fans and customers, and use Facebook’s promotional features to get the word out to the kinds of people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

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