Tuesday 6 January 2015

Facebook's powerful opinion leader

Facebook says it has 864 million daily active users--that's a significant share of the world's ever-growing population (about 7.3 billion). And it's very likely that readers like you can identify the Facebook CEO shown above.

Yes, he's Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in February, 2004 and now presides over a global empire of services.

He's also a powerful opinion leader, someone whose preferences and comments exert considerable influence on what people think and do. So when Zuckerberg started his own Facebook-based book club--part of his new year's resolution to consume more printed media--the FB book club page zoomed to 165,000 likes in only a few days.

The FB page for the first book choice (The End of Power) is linked to an Amazon listing, of course, so it didn't take long for the paperback version to sell out. As of this moment, the book is 12th on the Amazon best-seller list (with an upward arrow).

An interesting case of social media marketing meeting old-fashioned print media through the intervention of a young and well-known opinion leader.