Many Facebook marketers have been wondering what makes some Facebook pages grow tremendously overnight. In my experience, there are three factors that account to a sudden growth: 1. stumbling upon a new viral pocket; 2. heavy investment in ads (this is probably the most common); and 3. Facebook page mergers.

The chart above depicts what happened to the official page of the Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo. The page gained almost 500,000 users on August 29th, in contrast to a few thousand fan additions a day. Ronaldo’s page now has around 3 million fans, and is ranked as one of the most popular pages on Facebook.

So how did the fan base grow? It was actually quite simple. Facebook decided to add members from Ronaldo’s unofficial Facebook page (app. 500,000 users) to the official page. And that’s why you’re seeing this one-time spike. Chances are this won’t happen to you, so you’d have to think creatively about how to boost the number of your Facebook page fans.

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