At what rate are Facebook Pages growing and what factors affect how fast a fan page grows? Will more interaction with your fans help your growth rate?

The team at Fanpage Karma recently analyzed over 60,000 active Facebook pages in a period of three months to see how and why growth rates differ. Differences can be found in terms of the type of page, the engagement rate and how large the fan page already is.

Growth rate – measure how fast you gain fans

The growth rate is the average weekly increase in the number of fans in a given time period. The median growth rate for a Facebook page is 0.64% per week. This means that a fan page with 1,000 fans will gain about 25 fans per month, which is quite slow when compared with the best, or top 10% of fan pages, which have a growth rate of 2.22% per week, so an increase of about 88 fans per month.

In order for you to start doing your own analysis, a tool called Fanpage Karma allows you to assess how fast you or your competitors fan page is growing as well as analyze engagement rates, page performance and much more.

The engagement rate influences how fast a fan page grows

Next, they analyzed how the growth rate of fan pages is affected by the engagement rate.  Do more likes, comments, shares and overall interaction your fans have with your page mean that it grows faster? The top 10% of pages with an engagement rate of over 1% have a growth rate of 4.09%, which is extremely high compared with the overall median growth rate for fan pages of 0.64%. The median growth rate for fan pages with a 1% or higher engagement rate is 1.08%, while pages with the lowest engagement rate (less than 0.1%) have a median growth rate of 0.31%. In conclusion, if your engagement rate is high, then your fan page will most likely have a high growth rate.

The results of the overall study, including the above information and more, is summarized in this inforgraphic: