Social is About Creating Value Over Time: http://bit.ly/qdnKof /by @baekdal .

Written by Thomas Baekdal | Thursday, August 11, 2011 | Section: insights

I wrote a detailed article about where people really are on Facebook. In it you can learn that people spend far more time with Facebook's news stream than on your fan page. Meaning that the real power of Facebook is not what you do on your Facebook page, but rather your wall posts displayed in people's streams.

But even that isn't very effective. According a study by PageLever, a fan page is only seen by 3.19%, while your individual posts are only seen by 7.49% of your fans.

Another study by Comscore found a similar pattern. Only 8.4% see your posts per day. And for a company like Starbucks, their fans are 156 times more likely to follow them via the news stream than by visiting their fan page.

The reality is that the social effect is not what you think it is. It doesn't happen on your fan page, and it doesn't happen with the individual posts. The real social effect comes from the cumulative effect of engaging with your followers over time.

Read more about how social media really works, and what you need to do to make it work for you ...

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