Inside Facebook

Mafia Wars and Texas Hold’em may be two of the most popular applications on the Facebook Platform, and their Facebook Pages are also getting a lot of traffic, too.

In fact, Mafia Wars has over 1.6 million fans and Texas Hold’em Poker has 1.2 million, according to PageData. Not surprisingly, the total number of fans is steadily increasing for the two social gaming Pages, as each are adding about 150,000 fans per week.

Both Mafia Wars and Texas Hold’Em are gaming applications built by social gaming company Zynga. In Mafia Wars, players run a Mafia family with their friends and work their way to the top by engaging in criminal activity. In Texas Hold’Em, players join a virtual table and enjoy casual poker with friends or strangers. Both games incorporate virtual currency into the experience, inviting users to display their competitive energies in the context of a social experience.

Promoting social gaming applications may not be the first thing you think of when seeing how Facebook Pages are most often used. While most Facebook Pages are used by advertisers to market their brands, the main purpose of public profiles like Mafia Wars’s and Texas Hold’Em’s is to drive traffic to gaming applications. (App developers can also publish updates from their application’s about page in the upcoming redesign of the Facebook application directory.) Compare this to advertisers whose goal may be to drive traffic away from Facebook to their own websites.

Another point of interest is that out of the 10 leading Pages in the gaming category, eight were unofficially created and are being maintained by fans – a sure sign that there’s a gap between what gamers need and what social gaming companies are providing.

But this phenomenon may not be all that bad. As fans take the intiative to generate their own content and administer Pages in their own ways, when gaming companies are ready to own their own Page, they will have a head start in terms of knowing how their fans think.