Inside Facebook

In the first full week since Facebook rolled out its redesigned home page News Feed, several new Pages are appearing in the fastest growing Pages lists. Here’s a closer look at some of the leaders, according to our PageData analytics service, including the Turkish national flag, musician Cheryl Cole, and actor Jet Li, and others.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Türk Bayrağı	1,181,131	+543,084	+85.12
2.	MammaMia!	475,209	+411,560	+646.61
3.	Cheryl Cole	1,303,870	+369,405	+39.53
4.	Mafia Wars	5,205,107	+257,732	+5.21
5.	Vin Diesel	6,802,965	+211,945	+3.22
6.	Official Need for Speed	221,523	+209,649	+1,765.61
7.	How I Met Your Mother	1,142,127	+199,386	+21.15
8.	李连杰 Jet Li	2,105,039	+194,993	+10.21
9.	Fenerbahçe	1,737,872	+183,992	+11.84
10.	Starbucks	4,756,021	+178,945	+3.91
11.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,666,080	+152,645	+4.34
12.	Big Prize Giveaways	1,643,878	+141,305	+9.40
13.	Facebook Site Governance	276,286	+133,353	+93.30
14.	Abercrombie & Fitch	512,911	+131,333	+34.42
15.	NBA on TNT	128,362	+96,076	+297.58
16.	Celebs on Facebook	1,815,536	+90,278	+5.23
17.	Keri Hilson	322,813	+85,905	+36.26
18.	Verizon	261,970	+84,281	+47.43
19.	Glee	704,479	+82,595	+13.28
20.	The Bible	983,491	+77,595	+8.57

But first, an important note about the redesign. It is not yet clear how the new home page design, introduced on October 23rd, is affecting pages overall. Before, users saw a largely unfiltered feed of updates. Now, the default is an algorithmically-filtered feed, called “Top Stories.” It also includes photos, events, and other content that was formerly in a separate, now-defunct home page feature called “Highlights.” The live stream still exists on the home page, but you have to click on it within the top part of the newly-designed site in order to view it and set it as the default page; and, the live stream also shows you all of the content formerly in Highlights.

So, it’s not clear how visible pages are in Top Stories and in the new live stream, versus how visible pages were in the old design. What we do know is that Facebook will be featuring content in Top Stories based in part on engagement factors. As we wrote last week, components of the Top Stories algorithm include:

• How many people (and especially your friends) comment on and like stories from Pages you’re a fan of
• Which Pages you visit frequently
• Which Pages you interact with frequently

Interestingly, the typical top 20 page this week appears to have gained more fans than last week’s top 20 pages, with the total gain among the 20 this week coming to 3.84 million versus 2.26 million last week. Take a look at last week’s article for a side-by-side comparison.

At the top this week is the Turkish national flag (Türk Bayrağı), which grew by 543,000 to reach 1.18 million fans. The page started growing the day the redesign launched, and shot up most significantly over the weekend, but it has not grown at all in the last day or two (perhaps due to a data-reporting problem, as is sometimes the case?). Turkey has one of the largest Facebook populations in the world, with 14.5 million monthly active users in September. Perhaps the new news feed fueled a surge in patriotism-based growth for the flag’s page?

It’s also possible that Facebook added unofficial Turkish pages in to this page. The company only allows official representatives to create pages for organizations — in this case, it was presumably the Turkish government — and Facebook often takes unofficial pages and folds them into official. You can often tell when Facebook does this, as a page will suddenly go from gaining no users, to hundreds of thousands of users in a single day, then back to gaining no users. The 180,000 fans that the Turkish flag page gained on October 30 may have been due in part to this. However, its consistent growth over the last week or so suggests there’s more going on.

Same with Cheryl Cole — the hit musician has had a growing page for weeks. She has both a popular hit song and album out now; and, her record label has been actively promoting her through social media. Whatever the cause, the page saw massive growth over the course of the last month, including last week, when it gained 369,000 fans to reach 1.30 million.

Another celebrity, actor Jet Li, also saw steady growth, reaching 2.11 million fans after adding 195,000 this past week.

As usual, most of the other top pages grew due to one-day spikes. We’re ignoring those, as the growth is likely due to Facebook adding in unofficial pages. We’re interested in consistent growth, as this indicates high engagement and other features of well-managed pages.

Looking down the top 20 list, there a few other notable ones. The Facebook company page for site policy discussions, Facebook Site Governance, grew from 143,000 to 276,000, and reached #13 on the list. This growth was almost certainly the result of the company making a significant new draft of its privacy policy available for feedback; while the draft is located elsewhere on the site, Facebook asked users to provided feedback about it on this page.

Further down, the National Basketball Association and the TNT television channel’s page, NBA on TNT, grew by 96,100 to reach 128,000. Growth spiked on the 28th and has gradually continued since then, possibly indicating television advertising about the page. However, the page has some other notable features, including a livestream chat application, so Facebook users can watch and comment on TNT’s basketball shows from within the page. We’re interested to see if this app promotes further page growth.