Diary of a Facebook page

Facebook pages are one of the advertiser’s tools on Facebook. Businesses can create a page which looks and acts a lot like personal profiles. Instead of friends, people become "Fans", but aside from that the experience is very similar.

Recently we were asked to create a Facebook page for a business and have charted the progress here for you to see. The numbers here are true but are not provided as a benchmark of any kind, since every industry is different and fanbases are largely influenced by the people within the network.

First, a profile of the company: The business is a midsize organization with offices throughout the US and Canada. In spite of the economic downturn, 2009 has been one of their best years. They primarily serve consumers in a heavily regulated and highly competitive industry. Since their service is fairly specialized, they have found that social media marketing is somewhat challenging and previous attempts have fizzled. This is an attempt NOT to engage customers in a discussion about their service but to take a different route and engage customers on a topic that is of interest to them which has some relation to the service offered by the company.

Tuesday, June 9th: The page was created. Immediately, a call was put out to a couple of employees to become fans as part of the initial testing phase. 4 employees became fans.

Wednesday, June 10th: +2 fans (total: 6)

Thursday, June 11th: +1 fan (total: 7)

Friday, June 12th: +3 fans (total: 10)

Saturday, June 13th: +1 fan (total: 11)

Now this is where it gets interesting because on Sunday, June 14th there was no activity at all – the quietest day since the page’s creation earlier in the week, and yet by Monday the fan total had climbed to 20.

Tuesday, June 16th: +2 fans (total: 22)

Wednesday, June 17th: +4 fans (total: 26)

Thursday, June 18th: +7 fans (total: 33)

Friday, June 19th: +13 fans (total: 46)

Data is lagging for the remainder of the weekend but as of June 22nd, there are 51 fans.

So what can we learn from this? On its own, these numbers don’t tell us much. But when taken with other information, like the chart below, we learn far more.

The days in which there were the highest jumps in fan numbers were (not coincidentally) the days in which the page interaction spiked as well. It’s no accident that this kind of interaction has had an equivalent impact on the fanbase. When interactions show up on a person’s Facebook stream, the page is at the top of their mind and they respond.

So, if you are running a Facebook page, what should you be doing?

* Prompt your users to post on the wall
* Create discussions to encourage deeper conversations
* Send updates periodically
* Post links and video to promote time spent on your page
* Comment on each person’s post

The next stage for the company is to test a small advertising campaign to drive people to the site and see how that impacts the fanbase.

Contemporary VA

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