How to Find the Fans of Your Facebook Page

I had a client ask me the other day if they could identify their 10,000th fan for a giveaway. The truth is on Facebook, they don’t make it easy to know who your fans are. In the Facebook API it limits you up to only a few hundred fans that you can retrieve (and that only works on occasion). You can use Graph Search and a combination of a couple Google Chrome extensions to download up to about 5,000 fans (I’ve never been able to get more). But to get the entire list hasn’t been possible until I discovered this one cool hack, and it sorts it by most recent person who liked your page! Here’s how you do it:

The secret is in a little-used feature that allows you to easily block fans, and find fans you have banned from any Facebook page you manage. To get your list of fans, do the following:

1. Go in as an admin of your page to your Facebook’s “Settings” tab at the top. This is where you can configure your page and modify how you want to administer your page.
2. Select the “Banned Users” option on the left. This section allows you to configure who has been banned and who hasn’t.
3. In the drop-down that appears at the top, click on it and select “People who like this”. This is the list of all people who have liked your page!

In the ensuing list, if you scroll through it all you will have a list of every single person who has ever liked your page, sorted by who liked it most recently! So if you want to discover who your 10,000th fan is, wait until shortly after you reach 10,000 fans, go to this page, and count down the number of fans over 10,000 it was when you looked at the page, and the fan you end up at will be your 10,000th fan!

Unfortunately, you can’t use this trick to enable a Chrome extension like AnyAudience to download the list yet, so you’ll have to scroll through all users to see the entire list. This does enable that possibility though, and I anticipate app developers (maybe I’ll do it) will build out a Chrome extension that works with this so you can use your list to build lookalike audiences, or to analyze with Facebook ads.

However, this does provide, since it is a sorted list, a way to identify who your latest fans are, and do promotions around that. What other tricks have you seen allowing you to learn more about a Facebook Page’s audience?