Everyone wants to know how well Facebook is doing with mobile…

…so I just measured how many new fans the average Facebook page was getting from mobile.

Rather than just measuring “mobile fans,” I measured “mobile-fans-per-total-fans” to make sure these numbers weren’t affected by fluctuations in overall fan growth.

At the beginning of May, it was 5%. At the end of August it was 19%. That’s an increase of 2.8x in only four months!

To restate it to be extra clear: in May, out of every 100 new fans, the average Facebook page got 5 fans from mobile. By the end of August, the average page was getting 19 out of every 100 new fans from mobile.

It’s not clear to me why this jumped so fast. I checked with Facebook, and fans who come from ads targeted at mobile are included in this, since they came from a mobile device. According to Facebook, “If they became a fan through a mobile ad, then they would fall into both buckets. It would be attributed both to ‘mobile’ and ‘ads’ in the FQL table.”

The dataset contained 500+ pages with 100K+ Facebook fans, so the results should be statistically robust. That said, this is just what we’re measuring across our customer base, and may be totally different than other pages on Facebook.

You can measure how many of your fans are coming from mobile by opening your PageLever account, going to Fans > Like Sources. Here’s an example screenshot from one of our demo pages: