Terametric has 55 Facebook fans and we’re damn glad to have them. I know what you’re thinking. 55 fans? Really? Just 55? Doesn’t that “I hate ‘Battery Low’” fan page have more than 2.2 million fans?

It’s true, just 55. Believe it or not, it was much worse three short weeks ago. On February 3rd, our fan count stood at four. 1,2,3,4. In fact, the count on February 3rd was identical to our fan count at the end of the page’s first day of existence (October 1st).

Four months with four fans. Let’s take a moment to thank our first four stalwart fans for sticking with us and really believing. Oh wait, I was actually one of the first four. I guess that means we had three fans.

---

Ever the bandwagoneer, Wendy Troupe, our founder, only recently became a fan. I guess she was busy. (Just kidding about that bandwagoneer thing, we’re glad to have you aboard, too)

What, you ask, catapulted our fan page into this meteoric rise in popularity? How did we manage to saddle the lightning of public popularity?

It was simple really.

On February 5th Facebook began to roll-out its long-heralded design and features updates. One particular feature update caught our interest immediately:

Facebook has also streamlined the Live Feed and News Feed sections, which enabled users to see what their friends were doing at the moment. Both have been integrated into a single News Feed, with a “Most Recent” tab for live updates, and other highlights filed under the “Top News” tab.

A single news feed? And guess what? The algorithm that determines what gets featured in that single news feed favors images, links and video. That’s right, multimedia updates are given priority and are more likely to appear in a person’s streamlined, new news feed.

Leveraging this, we changed the nature of what we offered to our fans (all three of them) to better match how facebook would actually serve up our fans’ news feeds. Rather than just another link to our latest posting (though those are in there too), we started featuring images and video on our page. Not just any images or video though. We mostly limited our content to those juicy infographics that you stumble across on the web and instantly realize that they perfectly encapsulate and support a case you’ve been struggling to make. You know the infographics I’m talking about — the kind that surreptitiously end up in your next powerpoint and make your boss marvel at your diligent research skills.

And the rest is history. We optimized our content to leverage the algorithm and have been climbing the modest pop charts ever since.

And now for some shameless self-promotion: Visit our infographic-laden Facebook page and throw a fan our way if you like what you see. Who knows, the next infographic we find and post might just be the exact information you need to sell that next Social Media initiative internally.

Photo by Jewe

Tags: Customers, Engagement, Sentiment Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 3:06 AM by MattC and is filed under Strategy and Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.