You may or may not be aware, but Facebook recently introduced a concept called Pages which is their take on advertising. Because they are a social network, there is of course a viral aspect to it. Instead of traditional display ads, Pages work by first getting a “fanbase” and then advertising to the fanbase’s friends in the form of “Kevin is a fan of [corporate product], you should check it out too!” showing up on your friends’ news feed. It is a bit insidious because Facebook takes advantage of your trust in a relationship to push a corporate agenda. That being said, the information online about Pages is a bit convoluted because they are trying to market the advantages to its users, as well as the conflicting advantages to publishers.
After being confused for a bit, I learned that anyone can create a page for anything — you don’t have to be a company, and you don’t have to have ads. So I created a page for Free iTunes Downloads. I debated whether I should advertise the Facebook Page on the blog or not; as I wasn’t going to pay for ads, I wouldn’t be using it to drive traffic. In fact, the page would only serve to boost my ego in being another metric beyond RSS subscribers to measure the popularity of FiD.
Eventually, I decided to blog about my Free iTunes Downloads’ Facebook Page, as I didn’t really see the harm in pushing it. In the course of a day, I went from 21 (how did I randomly get 21 fans?) to 342 fans; not as many as I had hoped since I hover around 190,000 RSS subscribers. However, my feed subscribers jumped up to almost 220,000 the day after! Of course correlation does not infer causality, but if the Facebook viral marketing was indeed the cause, I converted 100 subscribers for each fan!
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