Facebook fans, likes and connections visualized
Graph of a Facebook fan page I created for a brand eclipsing 6-figure fans between April-May in 2009 (it has since grown to +3,000,000 fans).
Platform-specific communities can be a challenge to grow. It’s daunting because you’re probably already growing a voice for your brand on something like a self-hosted blog. But if you can spark rapid growth in a network external of your own, it can be a consistent organic referral source to the places you’re really interested in funneling traffic. Essentially, it’s a valuable outpost.
Let’s first look at some of the results of this page — then get into how it’s possible for you to do the same.
Before I share anything else, I do want to say Facebook fan page analytics leave much to be desired. They allow you to see:
I cut off the data as it just lists more top countries/cities/languages and I only want to share a sample of what you see as overview data. But it’s disappointing because you can’t really drill down to see more specific trends in data of the fans of pages. It’s almost no different than basic web analytics with a few extras like age. The age range is interesting, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why not show me more detailed buckets based on profile information such as education level, profession, etc. With groups this large there would be some interesting trends to see that wouldn’t be difficult for Facebook to display. Clearly they don’t want us knowing that much.
Interactions per post (likes, shares, comments) range from 12 to more than 1,300 – at this scale every image, post, video or link tends to get at least 100 likes/comments/shares.
Organic growth is consistently strong – with most days seeing around 500 or more new fans.
This brand is off and running – I have not been involved in their community building since May, 2009. But you can see by the daily growth of more than 1,000 new fans, they already have attained the critical mass necessary to sustain organic growth daily without necessarily doing anything. Although they have started to also see some fan attrition in September (I took a look at the situation and they could actually do something to stop this if they wanted).
1. Spark initial growth numbers within the network quickly
If you’re looking to reach a wide audience, (this brand has mass appeal) reaching enough active users in the network to reach a tipping point is the first, crucial step. There are just more potential people to share/like/comment on your content you’re adding into the channel (which in Facebook helps grow a fan page due to the fact this activity shows up in user feeds).
An easy way to start is get multiple influential users to invite all of their friends to become fans of the page. If you can get 20 people each to invite 100 users, and encourage those users to invite their own friends, you’ll start to see growth. Use incentives if necessary – contests, rewards for joining, etc. Facebook has specific rules now (which weren’t in place when I made this page) that make some of this more difficult, but there are still plenty of creative ways to do this.
2. Leverage external traffic streams/subscriber bases
Take stock of all your communities, email lists, websites and any other place you have a digital presence. Start to call them to action to join your fan page. Add links to your blog sidebar, put a CTA on the homepage of the website you’re already marketing, add a link in employee emails, put links in your email marketing, etc. Put it bold and up front to start – the key is to funnel enough subscribers to the page where a natural cycle of growth begins by virtue of more people becoming fans. The strategy here is simple: leverage what you have to spark growth in a new community until it’s growing organically.
But remember: the long-term play is to consistently siphon people out of Facebook to a community where SEO/social media value can really ramp up and you’re not limited by the rules of playing in a network you don’t control. In other words: once your fan page is growing organically, flip the funnel: start to move people out of Facebook to your own, self-hosted platform like a blog or more valuable area than inside the walled garden. Users are going to be more valuable if you can get them to a place where it’s all signal and no noise (Facebook’s signal to noise ratio is terrible).
3. Continually update the page with new content
More content on the page is going to be more content for users to interact with. And, due to how Facebook has setup their system, users consistently engaging with content is a key component to growth. By reaching into the streams of individual users your brand can start to grow fast if your content is worth reacting to.
Other ideas:
Of course, there are plenty of additional methods for growing Facebook fan pages/platform specific pages. But any additional recommendations or ideas are going to be more specific based on the brand or product involved (the above are all quite general). To grow the above page to 6 figures plus, we did some creative/buzzworthy ideas too – but you’ll have to come up with those yourself.
The bigger thing to remember is know how you’re going to make your Facebook presence work for your larger digital strategy prior to doing anything. Without this, sure – you can grow something popular, but it should still feed a larger objective.
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At first I thought you were referring to The Future Buzz page on Facebook – I thought wow that was quick :)
I really appreciate these pointers. It appears to be very true that getting that initial push to get fans is the really difficult part. And if you don’t have a budget for incentives or an existing marketing list, it can be up an uphill battle. In cases like these, perhaps it’s more critical to focus on building your community/email list first rather than putting too much focus on a fan page. Obviously you don’t have this problem with your six-figure fan page; some of us aren’t quite there yet :D
Thanks for sharing the wonderful data/visuals… great post!
Great stuff, Adam. My only questions here revolve around the type of business or client this is. I’m sure you didn’t divulge for good reason, but I think it might be helpful for folks to understand the context of this brand compared to theirs. It’s doubtful many mom and pop small businesses that don’t have 150K email contact lists and national advertising budgets can drive a six-figure fan following, as an example. Frame it for us and give us some general ideas of what people can expect on scale. Make sense?
Hey Jason – it was a relatively known consumer brand with a presence nationally. With that said – I sparked initial growth of this network without needing any mailing list or national advertising budgets.
Additionally – I don’t think a mom/pop small business needs a 6-figure Facebook group, especially if they are local.
With that said, if that mom/pop is shipping product online nationally or internationally they are on equal playing field with any other national brand to grow a following. Name recognition helps but I see plenty of name brands with relatively small followings (Ford is far more well-known than the brand I used as an example above and their following is currently 1/10th the size).
At the end of the day, you could spark growth for any good idea or brand in Facebook – well known or not – it’s totally possible. They just need to be worth talking about, or do something worth talking about.
This is quite an insightful post Adam. Facebook fan page analytics have frustrated me in the past as well, I especially like seeing that sentiment echoed here.
I’ve been doing some small testing in Facebook Fan pages lately (not anything extreme, I don’t have the backing of a business) but what I did was create a Fan page for my DJing website and ran a small Facebook ad campaign.
The results? About 30 fans within the hour.
This had me thinking, why bother running ads on Facebook to directly send a user to a landing page when you could build a better community by promoting your facebook fan page instead?
One of the things the business I worked for tried was running simple ads but they didn’t convert all that well (landing page really needed to be optimized) but I told them my small experiment and it had them thinking.
I think people are more willing to become a fan of a brand on facebook, compared to RSS and Twitter, because it’s a very simple one click opt in. It’s very non intrusive, with RSS you have to check your reader and make the commitment to view the article. With Twitter, you need to set up and account, learn how to use it and again, make the commitment of choosing link A over link B.
With Facebook, almost everyone has one and they use it regularly. Every day I see friends “become a fan” of a brand and ask myself why? What good do they receive from becoming a fan? Engagement.
With the fan page, as apposed of PPC campaigns and other social media, you’re able to talk with people that are within your demographic, instead of whoever just feels like following you for the hell of it.
I helped with the creation of a fan page for a new bakery my friends family recently started and within a few days it reached 300 fans. This may not sound like a lot but when you have 50 of these people now actively talking about the bread and coming in, this is a lot for local businesses when they are doing it every single day.
Sorry about being a bit all over the place but I think Facebook Fan pages are the way to go. You can “capture” people without having them give up email or use an external service, engage with them and gain amazing feedback.