Growing Your Facebook Fanpage Through “Passive Sharing“
For small Facebook fanpages, I still believe that Facebook Ads is the best way to grow their user base. But for bigger sites that grow by a three- or even four-digit-number of fans daily, ads are not really useful from a cost/effect-perspective when it comes to accelerating this growth. Therefore, many fanpages (incl. the small ones) try to publish a piece of content every once in while that will “maybe go something like viral" - meaning that they hope that some of their fans would share this content with their friends, so these friends would maybe get aware of that specific fanpage and like it.
Since a few months ago the number of shares is publicly available with each Facebook post, and by that we can all see that this actually does happen (remember the “find the cat”-picture from a week ago with 200k+ shares?), but just like with viral videos, this only happens with a tiny, minimal, microscopic percentage of posts. Why? Because it is “active sharing”. It requires the user to make the decision to want to broadcast this piece of content to all of his/her friends, by this make a statement about himself/herself and then take the appropriate action: click “share” and maybe even write some smart statement about it. Most people don’t do this. Facebook of course noticed that, and they are working on changing it by enforcing "passive sharing".
One good example is a similar development that happened a while back: Some 18 months ago there was a Facebook “share button” that you could embed on your site, and just like with sharing a Facebook post, users would have to actively decide to share that content with their friends. Then, the “like button” came and subsequently substituted the share button. You could just “like” some piece of content anywhere in the web, and in your news feed this would appear as a report of your action. Here, Facebook posts that you like (or recommend) a piece of content - it is not you actively posting something in your feed; you leave it to a third party to report your activity. This is “passive sharing”, and even if I failed to find reliable stats on how much the sharing of content has increased by this paradigm shift, I think that everybody can tell from experience that a) the count on “like” buttons is always significantly higher than it was on “share” buttons and b) you see this action in your newsfeed way more than you did see posts coming from that “share” feature.
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