Editor’s note: This excerpt of Scot Wingo’s ChannelAdvisor Facebook Commerce index is reprinted with permission. Read here about what the index is and WRAL tech Wire’s plans to publish Wingo’s findings.

MORRISVILLE, N.C. – March was a very strong month for fan growth. There were too many new retailer promotions to go into detail, but we’ll pull out a couple of highlights. As retailers continue to wake up to the Facebook Commerce opportunity, we should see continued acceleration in all metrics.

Here’s what we saw from a macro level in growth of the audience across the entire index:

• Growth – The total number of online retailer fans increased 8% since February – That’s a 96% annualized growth rate without compounding, so clearly Facebook users continue to ‘Fan/Like’ pages for online retailers at a strong pace. The pace is increasing, up from 5.1% in the Jan/Feb timeframe.

• Audience – The total fan count grew from 155.3m to 169.7m fans from Feb to March. This is the aggregate fan count across > 500 pages without de-duplication, but indicative of the scale of the Facebook Commerce trends we have all heard anecdotally and now we are able to track quantitatively.

 

From an absolute fan basis, there was a lot of interesting activity this month.  I wanted to specifically call out Build-A-Bear – they did a full court press in March to drive fans to their FB page and the results were a net increase of 500k fans on top of 340k for a whopping 146% increase – one fo the fastest movers we’ve seen.  They did it via:
 
Fans enter to win one of several $100 gift cards
 
A special product for Facebook fans
 
Heavily promoting their Facebook page on site, emails, etc. (maybe in stores, haven’t checked). 

Adidas added over 1m fans in a month, a very impressive movement that was driven by a ton of original content only available on their FB page.  They are leveraging their celeb endorsers (Snoop, Katy Perry, etc.) and putting small videos on FB that are promoted in a variety of media outlets to drive excitement and fans.

 

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