How I made 27.500 people join a Facebook group in 13 days – and got mentioned in Newsweek and Washington Post !

In the spring of  ’09, I taught a class in internet psychology at University of Copenhagen. As a “side assignment”,I ran a competition for my students. The task was simple, but required some applied psychology: Create the Facebook group with the most members in 12 weeks.

New blog category: with results from the experiments as they are made public.

Naturally, I needed to participate in the competition as well. So initially, I created a group called (translated from Danish): “My kid is also on Facebook“. It was a politically correct group for parents of tweens who are swarming Facebook right now.

The group started off well, but quickly stagnated at around 200 members. At the same time, I saw some of my student’s groups also approaching 200 members rapidly! I couldn’t let my students beat me – so I decided to surrender to the dark side of the force and use all dirty tricks I knew – in order to create a Facebook-group with one single purpose: TO BECOME BIG!

So, I created another group – it was a protest group for a case, close to the hearts of millions of Danes. It was called (translated form Danish): “No to the demolition of the Storks Fountain!”  The group protested against the demolition of “Storkespringvandet” a fountain in central Copenhagen, which everyone i Denmark knows (pics from Google) . The fountain is literally in the center of the city and was also made famous by a very popular Danish singer in the 60’s.

But the case was 100% fictitious. There were no plans to demolish the fountain (as far as I know) – but to  make it work virally and spread rapidly, I used every psychological propaganda-trick in the book to make it seem real. I never actually wrote that the fountain was going to be demolished (so legally, this was merely a confused fan-group) but it was implied everywhere.

I seeded the group  to 125 friends and they joined – and then it started spreading virally, through people’s feeds. At first, it went to 1000 in the first few days – but then it started growing more aggressively. After 3 days, it began to grow with over 2 new members each minute in the day time. When the group reached 27.500 members, my class and I decided to end the experiment. We changed it’s name to “I also love the Storks Fountain” (see it here) and then we sent out a questionnaire, to understand what actually made people join the group. How the group found them and what made them think that it was real. Around 800 members completed the questionnaire and hundreds of people wrote their story on the group’s wall.

The results were quite interesting and you will find them in this category, as they are made public.

Until then – If you have questions or comments, please contact me at anders[at]virkeligheden[dot]dk – if you find some interesting articles or have done some related blogging, feel free to add your link below (I may need to approve comments with links in them, but I’ll do it as soon as I can).