May 6th, 2010
A Facebook Fan By Any Other Name
At Facebook’s F8 developer conference we attended this year Mark Zuckerberg announced that “Become a Fan” buttons on pages from ABBA to ZZ Top would be switching to “Like” buttons. The official reasoning was that the Like button was a more frictionless way for people to establish connections with things they had affinities for. A confidential Facebook email obtained by ClickZ claims the switch is for better targeted ads as users have been using the Like button almost twice as much as the old Become a Fan button.
We’ve been fielding calls all week by managers and labels trying to understand the spike in Facebook fans they were seeing for their artists. Facebook prompted everyone to turn the bands, books, tv shows listed in their profiles into official connections through the Like functionality. Thus the spike was most pronounced for artists that people had listed in their profiles (i.e. Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan) as compared to newer artists like Paper Tongues whose debut album went top 10 on iTunes in April and didn’t see a spike in Facebook fans at the end of April.
We ran the numbers for the hundreds of thousands of artists we track for the past 30 days as compared to the 30 days prior:
- Average number of Facebook Fans artists added in April = 2,909
- Average number of Facebook Fans artists added in March = 819
- Average percentage change = + 255.2%
It will be interesting to see if this is a one time bump from prompting users to Like all the bands listed in their profiles or if the Like button really is more effective for getting people to become a Fan. The truth will lie in the data.