The New Yorker’s Facebook Presence Grows Slightly

Last Monday, The New Yorker decided to beg for Facebook fans by placing a Jonathan Franzen piece behind its Facebook page. The strategy – only letting those who ‘liked’ the Facebook page read the article – was odd and left FishbowlNY wondering if getting fans in such a way would cheapen the brand.

We’re still not sure about that, but we now know just how much The New Yorker gained from that experiment: The magazine added 16,000 fans to its page, or a growth of about eight percent.

Not that much, right? Either people thought the tactic was cheap, or they thought a Franzen article wasn’t worth the news feed spam that they’d encounter from The New Yorker once they were a fan. Either way, people appear to dislike (see what we did there?) the idea of the Facebook Wall.

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