Yes, Facebook users interact with companies!

Given the explosive growth of facebook —- over 500 million worldwide users, it is very interesting to note that over a third of those users interact with brands. What drives this? The offer of coupons, specials and discounts. That is an amazing number considering Facebook was considered almost exclusively a personal networking tool not that long ago. Companies are becoming more and more innovative when it comes how to communicate through social media, but the real “aha” is that consumers are also evolving in the way they think about communicating, sharing and interacting online. The online behaviors learned initially for personal use, have broadened to other (practical and commercial) areas of people’s lives. For more reading on this topic check out a post called “brands and social media”.

Experimenting With Facebook Fan Page Growth

Corralling facebook fans can be a tough sled. All of our facebook in boxes are inundated with fan page requests, most of which are ignored. Search the web and there are dozens of “How To” guides on the topic

Mashable penned a 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

For many companies a Facebook fan page is an integral part of their social media campaign. But, what elements help fan pages build up large followings and what can brands do to emulate the success of others? I’ve put together a list of specific elements that I believe have helped create fan pages with large, engaged, followings.

As we grow our Digital Sherpa Brand and our Turn Key Social Media Product, one of the things we are constantly doing is trying experiments, some of which may seem small, some that don’t work, and some that have an impact to results.

Experimenting With Facebook Fan Page Growth

So we started our Digital Sherpa Facebook Fan Page about 30-45 days ago. Our first exercise was to do like most folks do, which is to invite your friends from our personal profiles, which netted about (350) fans. Next two weeks, hardly nothing, fan adds completely stalled for the next couple of weeks.

Time for Something New

Sometimes to my demise, I am an action oriented guy, and while that doesn’t always work, some of our best discoveries have been from twisting and turning when things aren’t working. So, for the last two weeks, we have been adding three to five articles of interest, our own morning reads to the Digital Sherpa Fan Page, and I have tweeted the article, but linked to the Digital Sherpa Fan Page. The hope was that our Community of Interest found value in the shared, filtered article, and also became a Digital Sherpa fan.

I am a big believer in “borrowing ideas”. Dan McCrthy has blogged about how his blog traffic has increased from his recent, regular Good Reads posting, which is a similar idea on “sharing”

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

Here are Our Two Week Results,

We have added a little over (200) facebook Fans in two weeks. Not bad, and that is helping us move from the staled position. That tact may not work to get us to (5,000) fans, but it has moved the needle for now. I liken this to one of our angles as to how to grow blog followers, is by leaving thoughtful comments on like other blog posts. The point is this is, we are filtering and sharing what we find with our Community of Interest.

So we will keep you posted. What has worked for you in adding Facebook Fan Page fans?