Inside Facebook

Black Friday promotions and the increasingly heated competition between wireless providers helped drive Facebook users to become Facebook fans of brands such as Kohl’s, Verizon, AT&T Share and Gillette this week, according to PageData. As we saw last week, Twilight: New Moon, 2012 and Modern Warfare 2 continued to attract more fans as well, and Texas Hold’em Poker continued it’s steady rise towards five million fans to become the 8th largest fan Page on Facebook.

However, Will Ferrell’s Page took the top spot this week. It appears to have gone on an enormous one day roll of 429,173, almost certainly from Facebook adding unofficial pages for the actor in with his official page. On its own, the page only gained only a handful of fans directly.

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Will Ferrell 891,637 +429,197 +92.81 2. Texas Hold’em Poker 4,710,836 +213,309 +4.74 3. Verizon 581,887 +195,003 +50.40 4. Kohl’s 863,351 +133,831 +18.35 5. Disney 2,403,084 +131,224 +5.78 6. New Moon: The Movie 986,654 +125,941 +14.63 7. Wawa 319,899 +118,968 +59.21 8. Big Prize Giveaways 2,115,870 +110,081 +5.49 9. Mafia Wars 5,912,186 +98,094 +1.69 10. Twilight 4,337,237 +84,104 +1.98 11. Gillette 143,512 +70,874 +97.57 12. Türk Bayrağı 1,952,904 +69,897 +3.71 13. 2012 610,840 +62,501 +11.40 14. The Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe 103,903 +61,525 +145.18 15. Modern Warfare 2 404,830 +55,898 +16.02 16. AT&T Share 138,943 +55,198 +65.91 17. Walt Disney Pictures Backlot 124,792 +50,983 +69.07 18. Cake Boss 246,910 +48,722 +24.58 19. Vodafone it – Mobile people 118,870 +46,028 +63.19 20. Facebook 5,811,336 +43,002 +0.75

The two most interesting Pages this week, however, were certainly Gillette’s and Kohl’s. Gillette posted a message on its Wall on November 24 saying that anyone that became a Fan that day would be “entered to win a free Fusion MVP”, which received 571 Likes and 170 comments, which is good engagement. The problem is, however, that this promotion almost certainly violates Facebook’s latest promotional rules. We suspect that Facebook is giving brands a grace period, as this is not the first apparent violation that we have noticed, and we are currently checking into it.

Another interesting Page this week was Kohl’s. Kohl’s apparently offered a number of email-based in-store coupons as well as 15-30% off online. They’re also running their “Kohl’s Cash” promotion (for instance — buy $50 of merchandise and get a $10 gift certificate, etc). What Kohl’s has been doing with their Page, however, isn’t to use these discounts to attract fans – rather, they are using their Page as a customer service portal, and a rather active one at that. That’s not to say that they aren’t using their Page to broadcast out these offers – they are – but as far as we can see, they are in no way directly leveraging these offers to increase their number of fans. Facebook users are just signing up as fans because Kohl’s is making these great offers while offering good customer service on their Page.