Facebook’s Page updates feature, which let Page administrators send out messages to a Page’s fans, used to have laughable response rates. One test to a page with hundreds of thousands of fans previously resulted in less than 10 clicks. In other words: users simply were not responding to page updates. We’ve performed our own test and while our findings don’t show dramatic response rates, a 1.1 percent response rate in under 12 hours is a significant improvement over previous tests.

During a guest lecture to my social media marketing course earlier this week, Dave Kerpen of the kbuzz, suggested that the new design may have a greater impact on response rates. I decided to put Dave’s hypothesis to the test and so far the results are fairly positive. While traditional email marketing would have a much greater response rate, Facebook updates should no longer be ruled out as a way to contact your fans.

The response rate to our update is actually on par with the volume of traffic we get from an average post to the AllFacebook page stream based on the response rate we tested to one stream post yesterday. While the click through rate changes from post to post, it’s rare that you would receive an extremely high response rate to any update or stream post. While there are techniques to increase overall response rates, it’s important to know average response rates for comparison to other marketing channels.

Contrast this method with email marketing in which average opt-in email lists can have average response rates of 25 percent. It’s not a straight forward comparison however. Facebook Pages will attract responses from different fans from one stream updated to the next. In other words: you aren’t guaranteed to grab someone’s attention with Facebook Page updates. Does this mean that your company should avoid Facebook Pages?

Not at all! Facebook Pages combined with other marketing channels, like email, can prove to be extremely effective. Our Facebook Page drives upwards of 1,000 people a day to our website which is important to note. While an email letter to our more than 20,000 strong email lists would result in a greater response rate, we don’t send out daily emails so the comparison is like apples to oranges.

In conclusion Facebook Page updates are another great way for reaching out to fans. Since users are not sent email notifications about your Page updates you can afford to send updates more frequently without annoying users. As such, post updates in addition to stream posts in order to boost your response rates. Have you tested out click through rates on your own Facebook Page updates? What sort of response rate are you generating?

Update
The total response rate is now at approximately 3.63 percent.