Over the last two weeks a curious phenomenon has appeared across the Facebook fan pages we adminstrate alongside our clients; all have seen significant spikes in fan acquisition, but more interestingly almost all have seen the city of San Antonio, Texas rise into the top 3 cities.

Here are insight snippets from three of our clients – all three of whom are British, with a majority fanbase here in the UK:

In addition, here are the graphs of new fan accruals over the same period. Note how all spike significantly:

It should be pointed out that we’re not alone in noticing this phenomenon. A quick Twitter search shows various people noticing it – and, worryingly, some also taking it as gospel and making news out of the fact that, for example, the Tate here in London now has more fans in San Antonio than in London.

So what gives? One line of thinking is that these are two separate issues. The spike in activity may simply correlate with Facebook’s Open Graph implementation ensuring more content is being “liked” on the whole. However when it comes to the San Antonio anomaly, the only plausible argument we have seen is that the city is a huge datacentre hub for the USA, and that something is up with Facebook’s geolocating code. After all, if a user does not stipulate their location, Facebook draws it automatically using geolocation (most likely via IP).

Could that be the reason? Or is something altogether more bizarre happening? All thoughts gratefully received!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Latest News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.