We have a lot of blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts etc. across the company. One advantage of this is that I can to evaluate what works best. For social media tools, it is clear that engagement with your visitor is the number driver for increasing traffic.  For Facebook, this means that your fans are commenting on your posts or ‘liking’ them. This causes your posts to be exposed to all of their friends along with their friends comments which builds fans. For Twitter, retweeting expands your exposure and for blogging, getting your posts referred to by other blogs is the key.

Facebook tracks your fan pages’ engagement with the Insights tool. From my limited sample of a dozen or so fan pages, it seems that the growth rate correlates nicely with the engagement ranking. Sites that have a 4 or 5 engagement are showing growth rates of around 1.25% per day, sites with a 3 to 4 have a rate of about .75% per day and sites with a 2 or 3 have a rate around .25% per day. Below that sites don’t seem to have a material growth rate. Of course this doesn’t include special efforts at growing fan base such as email campaigns etc., this is just the natural organic growth of fans. A compounded growth rate of 1.25% per day is over 45% per month. The numbers get pretty staggering after a year. These organic growth rates also show how valuable early efforts at growing fan bases can be over the long term.

It will be interesting to see how long these numbers hold up. So far, it has been pretty consistent for up to 6 months.  Facebook was the easiest one to calculate these values. I’ll put the numbers together for blogs and Twitter in a later post.