Inside Facebook

Two winter blockbusters were big gainers this week, with the 2012 and Twilight: New Moon Facebook Pages seeing strong growth. Building on last week’s numbers, Outback Steakhouse continued to bring in new fans with its Bloomin’ Onion promotion (which stops at the 500,000th fan, so only 13,000 or so onions left), whereas both Türk Bayrağı (the Turkish Flag Page) and Disney, while continuing to attract new fans, showed about flat growth week-on-week.

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Texas Hold’em Poker 4,497,527 +305,964 +7.30 2. Outback Steakhouse 486,491 +203,561 +71.95 3. Mafia Wars 5,814,092 +197,991 +3.53 4. Türk Bayrağı 1,883,007 +166,740 +9.72 5. Best Buy 1,006,338 +161,411 +19.10 6. Disney 2,271,860 +152,087 +7.17 7. 2012 548,339 +143,120 +35.32 8. Inglourious Basterds 297,370 +136,930 +85.35 9. Twilight 4,253,133 +133,612 +3.24 10. Modern Warfare 2 348,932 +125,507 +56.17 11. Big Prize Giveaways 2,005,789 +124,201 +6.60 12. New Moon: The Movie 860,713 +107,070 +14.21 13. The Sims 3 681,547 +103,198 +17.84 14. Verizon 386,884 +98,442 +34.13 15. South Park 3,070,497 +92,464 +3.10 16. Minnesota Vikings 275,662 +75,619 +37.80 17. George Lopez 898,236 +70,870 +8.57 18. Starbucks 5,099,602 +65,024 +1.29 19. Sarah Palin 1,051,276 +64,881 +6.58 20. ABC Family 25 Days of Christmas 102,932 +57,370 +125.92

Other notables include the games Modern Warfare 2 and The Sims 3, both of which had game launches this past week, and Best Buy and Sarah Palin’s official page, each of which passed the one million fans mark (Palin is touring to promote her new book and is also on the cover of Newsweek). Verizon’s page also saw a large boost in the last week  which isn’t too surprising considering that they are running some pretty popular TV ads right now around the Droid and the 3G coverage map (two spikes in new fans, however, might be from Facebook adding in unofficial pages).

Finally, at number 20 this week is ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas page, which apparently was launched on November 10, and has steadily grown to over 100,000 fans in just 12 days. This is a great example of a media company using a Page for a specific program (ABC is owned by Disney, and the Disney page is another star). From the page’s Wall, it seems as though most people are becoming Fans of the page because they are looking forward to the programming on ABC Family in December, but nonetheless, the page is well thought out, especially the Boxes section (which many Page owners don’t use very effectively). The Boxes tab contains some useful content including a link to buy the audio CD of all the holiday songs featured during the month, a link to the website, and an especially useful and nice touch is the full December program schedule, so Fans don’t miss one magical moment.