Rarely do I try to post things on my blog that I can’t put my head around completely but here is one such case. When my partners and I launched NascarView earlier this year we of course setup a Facebook fan page for the project. Immediately we had about 100 or so fans and for the most part it stayed in that range.
Well on Friday last week I just happened to take a look at NascarView’s Facebook page and noticed that there were approximately 1500 or so followers, I was shocked because we were pretty much stalled out at around 200 or so for such a long time. In the past building a large Facebook Fan Base has been a huge time investment.
Well, I alerted my partners to what was going on and as each of us tuned into the fan page we would periodically refresh our screens and announce a new number of fans. The number of fans was climbing at an astonishing rate, sometimes each time we would refresh we would see approximately 10-20 new additions.
This growth continued throughout the weekend, and even as I battled the cold shivers and aching side effects of the flu I would find myself wandering from the bedroom into the office to get the latest count. I even texted my partners, one of whom was flying an airplane to Destin, Florida this weekend and the other who was running a 5k. We checked in w/ each other off and on throughout the weekend and remained astonished at how fast this number was growing. By the end of the day yesterday we had picked up our 12,000th follower. That’s right, and this morning we are on track to exceed 15,000.
Here’s the jist of the story for you, we have done absolutely nothing to promote the fact that we have a fan page on Facebook, absolutely nothing!!! Once we saw the trend that was happening I went ahead and posted some blog entries about NascarView on Facebook but I honestly can’t say that this had any impact at all.
Totally bumfuzzled to say the least I started trying to research what could be fueling this explosive viral campaign promoting our project. I spent the better part of the evening last night just looking at the new Facebook. A lot of people think that I spend a lot of time inside of Facebook but I really don’t, I mostly update my status using Twitter during the day, but that’s another story altogether…
In my research I found that fan pages inside of Facebook now appear in the people you may know section of the site. For instance, if you have 12 friends who are also friends with someone, they usually show up in this category so that you can add them to your friends list as well. Well, apparently with the new Facebook updates, fan pages are a lot more like profile pages. With this being the case, apparently when someone adds NascarView to their friends list, it then shows us under their friends “people you might know” section.
This is the only thing that I can use to explain how this rapid viral growth has been fueled. Here’s a screencap of our insights metrics from Facebook, notice the timeframe that all of this started happening, amazing…
Facebook | Nascar View
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