Inside Facebook

Diva Cheryl Cole has a dance-pop smash hit out now called Fight for this Love, from the just-released album 3 Words. She’s not just number one on some music charts, but also on our list of the top 20 Facebook pages that gained the most fans in the past week. She got 305,000 new fans to reach 934,000 Facebook users. The reason?

Not just releasing a hit song and a new album that a lot of people like, maybe. Her label, Universal, has been doing an aggressive web-focused marketing campaign for months. As part of that, her Facebook page has been constantly update with fresh links, photos, and other media to keep fans engaged.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Cheryl Cole	934,465	+304,776	+48.40
2.	Big Prize Giveaways	1,502,573	+256,461	+20.58
3.	Mafia Wars	4,947,375	+198,870	+4.19
4.	Slash	1,240,953	+133,398	+12.04
5.	Where the Wild Things Are	1,871,605	+129,527	+7.44
6.	Microsoft Windows	241,258	+115,289	+91.52
7.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,513,435	+114,200	+3.36
8.	Celebs on Facebook	1,725,258	+108,585	+6.72
9.	Vin Diesel	6,591,020	+94,144	+1.45
10.	Türk Bayrağı	667,070	+85,927	+14.79
11.	Glee	621,884	+84,596	+15.75
12.	Facebook	5,532,732	+83,584	+1.53
13.	Playfish	1,512,132	+82,868	+5.80
14.	The Bible	916,976	+76,785	+9.14
15.	The Breast Cancer Site	612,499	+76,752	+14.33
16.	2012	302,315	+69,615	+29.92
17.	Contre Nicolas Sarkozy	119,383	+61,868	+107.57
18.	Twilight	3,894,463	+61,036	+1.59
19.	Justin Bieber	848,824	+60,521	+7.68
20.	Red Bull	1,550,321	+59,966	+4.02

Her page has been showing daily growth in the tens of thousands of users over the last month, spiking in the last several days as her song has climbed up the charts and as her album arrives at stores. It’s not clear whether Cole’s Facebook page is helping to drive the success of the album, or is benefiting from it, or some combination of the two.

In any case, in this past week, we also saw a few other interesting pages grow. At number four was Slash, the former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist, whose page was apparently advertised by Facebook itself several weeks ago. We noted in last week’s top 20 pages list that he’s been seeing strong growth for awhile. For whatever reason — maybe the viral sharing that the advertising has prompted among Slash-loving Facebook users? — the page has continued to gain more fans. It gained 133,000 new fans last week to reach 1.24 million.

Popular movie Where the Wild Things Are also had a strong week, as we covered in more detail on Friday. It has 130,000 fans now, to reach 1.87 million. We also noted on Friday that the page didn’t seem too active — but whoever is running it made three more updates on Friday afternoon, including a poll. So we’ll mute our criticism for now.

At number six, meanwhile, is Microsoft Windows. As Windows 7 just launched, fans seem to be voicing their appreciation. Although Microsoft is a strategic investor in Facebook, so we wonder if this page may have been, like Slash, receiving a little free-advertising love. After weeks of minimal growth, the app gained nearly 115,000 people in the last few days to reach 241,000 fans.