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Facebook Stats Analysis: Is Fan Page Growth Slowing?

EMarketer reports that 82% of CMOs plan to increase their social media efforts over the next 3 years. It’s a fair assumption that many of them will be looking to grow their social channel presence, often leading with Facebook.

But if this chart is any indication, growing that fan base may be more difficult than it used to be, and it seems to have gotten significantly worse around the same time that Facebook growth began to slow.
As you can see, growth in the second half of 2010 reached routinely double digits, and often broke 20% in a single month. As we rolled into the first half of 2011, however, it was not uncommon to see growth rates of 6, 7 and 8% per month. But in the last six months, we’re seeing growth rates as low as 2%, and December 2011 showed an average growth under 2% for the first time ever.

Not Just Percentages

Percentage growth is easy to attain on small numbers, but correspondingly harder to attain on a large number. So is this decrease in fan growth simply a math quirk?

To double check that, I analyzed the number of fans added by the top 50 branded pages each month over the same period of time last year versus this year. The results are compelling.

  • July – Dec. 2010: Top 50 pages added an average of 47,375,504 fans per month
  • July – Dec. 2011: Top 50 pages added an average of 12,087,944 fans per month

This shows that these pages are growing at only 25% the rate, in real numbers, that they were growing a year ago. Charting monthly growth in real terms leads to a chart with roughly the same configuration as the percentage growth.

What about Page Age?

It’s a valid question to wonder if it’s something about these specific pages, rather than Facebook fan pages in general. While the analysis includes 50 pages each month for two years, it’s still a limited data set and, by definition, are the largest brand pages in the world. Since Facebook doesn’t publish the date a page is created, I can’t factor in the age of the page and look for a correlation there.

We Need More Data

While I looked for supporting data online, I couldn’t find any similar analysis, so at this point, I turn to you. What are you seeing? Are you noticing that you have to work harder to add new fans, or is it just as easy as it was a year ago? How have your pages performed over the last 12-18 months, when you’re not doing concerted fan acquisition programs? Have changes to Facebook’s structure impacted your organic growth rate? Positively or negatively? Please let us know in the comments.

Article by Jim Tobin

Jim Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media, a leading social media agency, where he works with clients including Microsoft, Samsung, Chrysler, Verizon and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book Social Media is a Cocktail Party.