Inside Facebook

This past week saw two brands notably continue to gain more fans on their Facebook pages, according to our PageData service. One, Cadbury’s Wispa chocolate bar, has been getting a boost from a limited-edition caramel version that recently hit stores. The other, Coca-Cola’s vitaminwater, has been running an extended campaign asking Facebook fans to help it choose a new flavor of watery beverage.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	3OH!3	745,969	+267,381	+55.87
2.	Cadbury Wispa	669,894	+220,219	+48.97
3.	vitaminwater	901,747	+158,525	+21.33
4.	Mafia Wars	4,243,237	+120,044	+2.91
5.	Red Bull	1,292,565	+114,590	+9.73
6.	Skins	526,350	+113,124	+27.38
7.	Petcentric by Purina	137,289	+108,805	+381.99
8.	Taylor Swift	2,199,789	+96,807	+4.60
9.	David Guetta	1,157,878	+77,005	+7.12
10.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,106,094	+70,637	+2.33
11.	Facebook	5,152,498	+64,143	+1.26
12.	JCPenney	547,403	+56,943	+11.61
13.	Celebs on Facebook	1,351,078	+56,728	+4.38
14.	The Bible	538,931	+56,376	+11.68
15.	Dr Pepper	870,977	+54,900	+6.73
16.	House	2,199,241	+54,747	+2.55
17.	Türk Bayrağı	459,585	+53,145	+13.08
18.	Total Wipeout	359,033	+51,628	+16.79
19.	iTunes	1,966,977	+49,330	+2.57
20.	Lady Gaga	3,963,305	+46,874	+1.20

Wispa, a chocolate bar available in the United Kingdom, has also been available in the caramel “Gold” version since September 8th. Since then, the Wispa page has grown from 266,000 fans to 670,000 fans today, with 220,000 joining in the last week. The original bar was re-introduced in 20070, years after being discontinued due to the Facebook-based activism of its devotees. It was originally meant to be a limited edition, but it stayed so popular that Cadbury decided to make it a permanent part of its product line. Perhaps, as we’ve noted before, the surge in the page’s fan base could convince the confectioner to make Gold permanent, too.

Meanwhile, vitaminwater’s growth last week — up 159,000 to reach 901,000 today –  is more straightforward. The company has built a slick Facebook app, connected it to its Page, and promoted the whole thing in television commercials featuring stars like rapper 50 Cent (who owned a large chunk of the company before it sold to Coca-Cola) and basketball star Steve Nash. So growth is not entirely organic, but that’s fine. The more fans vitaminwater can get, the more it can learn about those fans and figure out what sort of new flavor to come out with. Ultimately, this can mean better sales for the company. It’s a fascinating experiment that we’ve covered in some detail already.

Note: Wispa and vitaminwater are actually at number two and number three for this past week. Number one goes to electronic rock group 3OH!3, which saw a sudden leap from 481,000 to 746,000 over a few days last week. Given the very slow rates of growth on the page before and after these spikes, we’re assuming that Facebook has folded some unofficial pages for the group into the official one.