How much traffic can a Facebook page bring your site? Is it worthwhile to build a fan base on Facebook?

For sites serving a passionate niche market, fan pages are an excellent investment because:

• You can build you fanbase quickly using Facebook’s very targeted ads
• You can gather quality community feedback
• You can encourage fans to interact directly with your site (increasing site traffic and user-generated content)
• Pages provide tools that your site may not have (discussion board, wall, photo albums, etc.) to better engage your users

In this short post I’ll discuss the level of fan engagement you might expect from your page. My experience is mostly drawn from building the pages for the video site FightTube, which include: FightTube, FightTube – Taekwondo, FightTube – MMA, and others. The main content on these pages are links to FightTube videos, updated frequently.

How Pages Deliver Value

Initial Contact and Exploration

When someone discovers your fan page they’re likely to click-through to your site if they’re presented with engaging content. I found that about 85% of new fans clicked a video link to our site on the same day they became a fan. Other engaging content could be links to photo albums or to full articles. Visitors could bounce off your fan page if your content becomes buried between fan comments, so setting the “Default View for Wall” to “Only Posts by Page” will keep things clean. You can also showcase your most engaging content by creating an FBML tab for it, and setting that tab as the landing page.

Fan Updates

You can "send an update" message to all fans, which goes to the "Updates" section of their inbox. This isn’t terribly useful in my opinion because I don’t think most people check their "updates", and I’ve had poor response rates using this.

Page Status Updates

When you update your page’s status (the "what’s on your mind?"), it can potentially reach the news feed of all of your fans. Of course it won’t reach them all, because:

• Some fans won’t visit Facebook in time (other content will bury your status)
• Some fans may use filters that exclude it (page status updates are seen under the filters "News Feed" and "Pages", but not "Links" or "Status Updates").

So how many fans can you reach with a status update? That’s a great question; I don’t know because there’s no direct way to measure it. For short statuses featuring a video link (and video thumbnail), I’ve measured about:

• 5 to 15 percent of fans click through to the video
• 0.1 to 2 percent of fans "like" the status
• 0.1 to 1 percent comment on the status

The chart below shows interactions for one particular fight video. This link was posted at 2 P.M. on a Sunday, but I feel the optimum time of day for a page update (assuming North American and Western Europe fans) is 3 P.M. from Monday to Thursday. The graph illustrates how about 80% of interaction occur in the first eight hours.

Photos, Videos, Events, Links, and Notes

These can also be used to reach your fanbase, but I don’t use them so I don’t have much to say here. Note that videos are special: any videos a page uploads to Facebook will have a "become a fan" button permanently attached to it. If the video becomes widely spread (using "share"), it could win you many new fans.

Next posts:

The value of a fan: Monetizing Facebook Pages

The cost of a fan: Growing Facebook Pages