Can the Economist Buy Half a Million Facebook Fans?

The Financial Times is reporting today that its sister publication the Economist is trying to boost its social media presence. This means, according to the paper, having an audience on Facebook of at least 500,000 fans six months from now. Which may not be quite as hard as it sounds, given that it already has a fanbase of 180,000 or so. (It also wants 750,000 Twitter followers.)

How will it get there? It will spend, the paper says, "tens of thousands of pounds" in marketing.

This little nugget tells you a lot about where social media stands right now. Back in the old days—say, 2006—if a company wanted to boost its presence online, it would advertise or otherwise acquire readers for its Web site. That, theoretically, would be worth the money spent because as the publication increased its Web audience, it could charge advertisers more.

What the Economist is embarking on is far riskier. Because even if the desired audience targets are met, the overwhelming majority of communications that take place with fans and followers will not happen on Economist.com, but rather within the Facebook and Twitter environments. Yes, some of those fans and followers will click onto Economist.com, but will that number be large enough to justify the expense? Viewed skeptically, this looks like a direct mail campaign that doesn't ask people to pay for subscriptions.

The gamble, of course, is that there is some other, hard-to-define benefit from having such a massive social media presence—and there may well be. Economist.com is also apparently planning to become itself more like a social media site, as well as integrate with Facebook via Facebook Connect. And thus it's at least conceivable that advertisers will see the Economist's engagement with social media as a powerful platform. A big if, but certainly an experiment worth watching.