I have been fascinated with some stats on Facebook Fan Pages that I stumbled upon yesterday (referenced at the end of this post).

I quote verbatim:

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"Overall, the average number of fans for any given page is approximately 2,104. This number is thrown off by those pages with millions of fans even though there are only 816 pages with more than half a million fans. Since the number 2,104 completely throws off the average I decided to go ahead and calculate the mode. The most frequent number of fans for Facebook Pages is 7. While our system has tracked over 61,400 pages which now have 0 fans, many of those pages have actually been removed by Facebook and as such we are not including pages with 0 fans.



Based on our numbers you have approximately a 40 percent chance of obtaining more than 100 fans but only a 9.5 percent chance of attracting more than 1,000. Additionally, only 5 percent of users have more than 3,000 fans and half that number have attracted over 10,000. 237 pages have surpassed the 1 million mark, in contrast to Twitter where only 14 users have accomplished such a feat.

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So it seems that we are not doing too bad with our Royal Challengers Fanatic Fans community page on Facebook that we have been steadily working on for last 3 months. Here are some insights that may be of interest.





Coming back to the data source which measured the number of Fans - I wonder why many clients (and consultants?) are so obsessed with just the # of Fans. So here is our 2 cents on the topic:

a) It is very important to keep a watchful eye on the rate of growth. You need to build slowly.

b) It is far more important to keep an eye on the engagement metrics; a key component which does not get measured by Facebook, is the volume of original content contributed by fans (i.e. user generated original content within your brand page). Encourage Fan contributed content.

c) If nobody engages around content you produce, and assume you have fan base of 5000, it is like sending email to your database of 5000 and getting a 0% click through. You can always console yourself that you got some exposure, but you will be kidding yourself.

d) Fans can easily "tune out" (hide) your outbound communication. It is like delivering daily emails updates to a spam folder. Keep updates to a general level of tolerance

Finally, don't fall for cheap tricks from your vendors, like these. Unfortunately, short-cuts just do n0t work, and hurt your brand in the long run.






If you want to read the entire article, referenced above - The long tail of Facebook Pages, click here.



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