The NYT is declaring that it cracked the code on using Facebook as a promotional vehicle. The company says that a branding campaign this month aimed at building Facebook fans around election news netted the paper “4.3 times the value of our spend,” according to a memo by president Scott Heekin-Canedy and posted on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab site. It’s unclear exactly what that means: Heekin-Canedy doesn’t say what the baseline value of its ad spend was, and we called for clarification but didn’t get an answer.

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Heekin-Canedy claims the branding campaign boosted NYT’s fans more than threefold within 24 hours — from 49,000 to 164,000, helping the paper exceed its 2008 goal of 100,000 fans. The NYT Facebook campaign kicked off with a front-page ad on the social net that asked for members’ comments on a video featuring Barack Obama. NYT says that 68.3 million people saw the ad and 34,000 comments were shared.

There is, of course, another possible explanation here: That the dramatic increase in Facebook fans was a complete anomaly, nothing more further evidence of the huge surge of interest in an historic election. Full memo is here (PDF).