Toys R Us finds hordes of fans on Facebook

Facebook announced today that Toys R Us has become the fastest growing brand on Facebook, growing between 40,000 to 95,000 fans per day over the past week. Toys R Us recently released a new catalog on their Facebook Fan Page, called the “Big Book” and currently has 396,301 fans.
Unsure of the exact reason for the tremendous growth, Facebook “assumes it’s the result of an ad campaign,” juxtaposed with a number of features on the company’s Fan Page stimulating growth of new fans.
One of these features on the Toys R Us Facebook Fan Page includes a specialized one catering to the impending Black Friday that immediately follows Thanksgiving Day and is notoriously the biggest shopping day of the year. This “Black Friday Preview” application allows fans to find out what deals are available, and limits visibility of certain Fan Page tabs to fans alone — non-fans are forced to become fans in order to access certain tabs on the Toys R Us Fan Page.
From a technical standpoint, ContextOptional, the company that helped develop the Toys R Us Fan Page, didn’t use the standard “fb:visible-to-connection” tag in the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for limiting visibility. Instead, it appears to use a customized simple application to verify whether a user is a fan or not.
According to Facebook’s predictions, there is a high likelihood that the Toys R Us Fan Page will reach over 400,000 fans by the end of today, which is typically only achieved using the “pay per fan” model. Although the growth in new fans decreases each day , Toys R Us has become one of the top brands across Facebook in a very short amount of time.
The success of the Toys R Us Fan Page might be a result of the rapidly impending holiday season, combined with the fact that marked down prices that are only visible to its fans. The large fan base could also be attributed to the continually growing demographic of new Facebook users in the 30-55 year old age bracket who are likely parents and/or grandparents of younger children, and therefore targeted Toys R Us consumers.