A Few Things I’ve Learned From My 260,000 Fan Facebook Page

I manage several Facebook Pages in the hundreds of thousands, but of those, one I’ve had the privilege of personally owning (the others are owned by Brands I represent). Somehow, my first book’s Facebook Page (http://facebook.com/fbbook), has accrued over 260,000 fans in just a few months, and it’s been a lot of fun having the experience of managing a personal Facebook Page with that many fans that I can do whatever I want with. Here are a few things I’ve learned. I’ll share more as I have more time to experiment:

• What’s in a name? Everything. The number one reason for my Facebook Page’s success and popularity has been its name. The name, “I’m on Facebook–Now What???”, which is the name of Jason Alba’s and my book, is catchy. When someone clicks like on the Page, it says, “so and so likes I’m on Facebook–Now What???” Their friends get a giggle, go to the Page, click like, and so the cycle continues. Consequently, a large portion of those that have ended up liking the Page have been a very young audience. I have ways of solving that which I’ll share in a later post.

  The name of your Page can make or break how viral your Page goes. Think about what it will look like when in a friend’s stream, it says, “so and so likes such and such”. If it stands out enough, their friends will like it as well.

• Facebook Questions are a lot more fun when you have an audience. I’ve posted a few questions to the Page, and almost immediately I get hundreds of responses. This can pose for an excellent opportunity to get valuable insight on data you want to learn about from an audience that can often be bigger than the samples that common polling agencies will gather for you.

  Consider contracting with someone who has an audience similar to yours that you can poll (or build your own audience in a similar fashion).

• Posts have a lot more value the more fans you have. When I post on the Page, almost instantly people respond and like the posts. In many cases it’s immature responses like “first!” and other trollish responses, but some times there can be some really interesting discussions that result. It has been a really fun way to learn about my audience and what they want, giving me more ideas for future posts.
• For this Page in particular, enabling posts by fans on the Wall significantly increases the number of likes per day. I tried an experiment. I enabled fans to be able to post on the Wall and for that to be the default view for the Page. I then turned it off for a few weeks, and then turned it back on again. In the graph (which you can see below) of daily likes that Facebook provides, the parallel of likes to having the Wall posts enabled is almost equal, and very significant. It is very clear that allowing posts by fans on the wall increases the number of daily likes, and that I should leave it on.

  I recommend you try this experiment on your own Page though. One Page is not enough of a sample to determine if you will see the same results. Let me know if you see similar.

Notice the dip that happened when the Wall posts were turned off