I subscribe to Bob Bly’s marketing newsletter. Even though I’m not a marketing guy, I always learn something useful about marketing (and teaching involves marketing, even if it’s the basic “know your audience” thing) and about good writing, as you can no doubt tell by the scintillating prose on this blog.

Mike Rogers has ranted written frequently about Facebook and other social media. Here’s just one sample: Too Many Social Media Parties

There’s so many social networks. I won’t name them, you probably know more than me. I use Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be way more social networks than we could possibly need.

Well, here’s an excerpt from a Bob Bly’s ezine I got today, specifically here’s the part that refers to Facebook:

Ad Age, a six-week study of Facebook’s Fan pages showed a mere 0.45% of fans engaged in any way beyond clicking “Like.” This indicates that Facebook fan bases and actual engagement aren’t the same thing.

The average engagement for the 10 brands with the largest fan bases (like Harley Davidson, Nike and Porsche) was 0.36%. The
highest engagement was in the alcohol category and the lowest in laundry detergent, social platforms and apps.

In other Facebook marketing news, my colleague Brian Croner reports that “world famous Sun Valley Ski Resort here in Idaho,
invested their entire $950,000 ad budget in Facebook advertising in 2011 and it bombed. It bombed so bad in fact, they fired
their marketing director. Last year they had more snow than they knew what to do with and still couldn’t pack the hotels after
using FB exclusively.

This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly Direct Response Letter. Visit Bob’s website at  www.bly.com Check out his site for excellent marketing/ad copy writing tips and advice.

And here’s another article, from February this year, that suggests Facebook’s “like” might be losing out to LinkedIn’s “Inshare” button. Whatever that is: Are People Falling Out Of Love with “Like”?

Look across the Web and you see it. While content surfers “like” plenty of content, they’ve fallen hard for LinkedIn’s “inshare” tab. It’s long been true of business news, which users overwhelmingly share with their professional networks; but even at general interest sites such as Time and the Atlantic, the “inshare” is beginning to steal some of Facebook’s “like” button’s thunder.

…

Andrew Lipsman, ComScore’s vice president of industry analytics, says he believes that the “trend you’re honing in on, and that I see, too, is a lot more ‘insharing’ going on now, which I think has to do with LinkedIn’s effort to turn its network into less of a utility and more of a content site.”