At no single time, we’ve observed a strange phenomenon in Facebook fan counts.  On, but not limited to, January 23rd and 24th, March 16th-18th, and May 20th and 21st a statistically significant number of artists experienced spikes in their fan counts, suggesting that there was a Facebook specific event that happened, rather than any actual change in fan engagement.  At this time, our best guess of the cause of the event is Facebook combining the counts from the various duplicates of artist fan pages in an effort we’ve dubbed page rollups.  We will update when more information becomes available.

Posted May 24, 2011