How many users can you reach via Facebook? It’s quite interesting to have a look at the numbers, to see which pages have most fans, and to see how the fan count develops over time. Here are two examples I picked because the numbers are available and both of them help me make my point.
Both are fun ideas, the first one is understandable throughout the world, because almost everybody has heard of Mr Bean and Avatar. So, how many out of 400,000,000 members are fans of a funny idea like this? Less than 2M. In absolute figures, 2,000,000 is quite a number. But it’s less than 1%. Which reminds me of a post of Derek’s. And here’s how the group grew.
Plain to see that the hoopla the idea created wore off pretty quick. But generating 300,000 fans per day is still not bad, isn’t it? Plus, what bosses love to see is a linear chart because it suggests constant growth, which appears to be a good thing. But it tells a smart marketer that the idea is not catching on, because the multiplier in each generation is 1 or less.
And this is an idea that could catch on regionally, quite a hoot at first, but it also doesn’t prevail. Out of 7.2M Facebook members in Germany, no more than 500,000 like this idea enough to become a fan, which makes a share of about 6.7%. Funny to note that on day 12 the page got featured on TV and the press, and you can see no impact. It rather suggests that without this support growth would have declined even further by now. Or maybe because of it.
Compare this to the most popular pages, only two of which have more than 10M fans. And most of them are REALLY BIG names, brands that have been around for years and have worldwide leverage. Now that the competition for attention has been cluttered up on another channel, does it really make sense to squeeze your shtick in there to end up with 200 fans? Besides, they are not really fans, because chances are that they’re not passionate about you and what you do. Why do you think you need to join?
Well, it makes sense to join. Because you still have the opportunity to reach the right people, the people you want. To do so, you really need to sharpen your profile or you won’t cut through. Even people you might love you don’t have all day to keep looking for you. And the passing on of ideas stops sooner than you might have thought.