TechWag

: Image via CrunchBase

Not many people administrate Fan Pages, but there is a wealth of information that can be gained about people who are making themselves fans. This information is particularly helpful when trying to work out if you are hitting the target market you are looking to hit, or if you have found a new market you didn’t even know existed.

Below is a screen cap of the three week old fan page that we built for our startup. We have not advertised this page; the only real connection to the page is via the blog that we are using for book reviews and other information for people who are interested in what we are doing. Other than that, we are simply letting people find the page on their own.

The insights page is the page that social networking managers are going to want to see because it breaks down who has connected with the page and the things that are being discussed on the fan page. Our break down is fairly simple; we discuss comic books and other books on a routine basis. But what it tells us about our fans is when we hit a note, or something that will resonate with a group of people on the web site.

For example, we got our most fans when we discussed India Authentic, not only engagement on Facebook, but engagement on the web site and engagement on FriendFeed. Given that engagement for the title – we threw up another Indian title from Virgin comics to see if this was a fluke, and found that the other title did not gain the same interest as the original title. The conclusion we made was that we hit a nerve, but not one that would in general mean a market for us to explore. What was also interesting was that in private communications, one customer wanted us to see if there was a place to download the book.

Downloading the book is not the best idea considering the title is cheap, goes for pennies on both Amazon and EBay. It would have been very cheap to purchase but the download request tells me that people want to start getting their comics in an electronic form rather than a dead tree form. This would be a new market for us to explore, and one that would be worth taking a look at because if the new tablet systems come out, reading comics on your tablet simply makes sense. The screens on the Iphone are too small right now to truly flesh out what is happening in the panels. A tablet however would have the screen size to make this work, and work brilliantly.

The data from the Fan page has proven to be of use, and in some cases valuable for letting us know when we have hit something that people are interested in, and willing to discuss. If you are running a Facebook fan page, it is well worth looking at the data that is being presented to you, and seeing how people are interacting with the page and what seems to strike a chord with the readers. For us the conclusion was Indian comics, but only if someone can get them in an electronic format.