Bigger Brands See Lower Engagement

AdAge recently published a study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, showing that ‘only 1% of Facebook fans engage with brands.’

The headline of this article is extremely misleading, because if you read past the first few paragraphs, you’d see that the institute looked at the People Talking About metric as a proportion of the top 200 brands on Facebook over a six-week period.

I’ve written before that small to medium-sized business are best suited for Facebook, and am therefore not surprised at all that enormous Facebook pages have low engagements. I’ve also written before that brands with such large followings are often strapped on resources (mostly time and man power) to effectively engage users, which contributes to the statistic that only 5% of wall posts on brand’s Facebook pages ever receive answers. But that still doesn’t mean that a 1% engagement rate on a large brand page is a poor performance. (See Kate Spade number below). Can you really argue that 7,000+ users (1.6% of Kate Spade users) actively engaging with your brand is bad?

Facebook Isn’t The End-All, Be-All

What AdAge’s article does point out is that people need to understand what Facebook can do for brand and what it can’t do. It provides a good reach and its audience of loyal fans is good for market research and word-of-mouth advocacy, but it can’t be your only marketing strategy.

It also points out that Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers, rather than the more casual shoppers that a brand needs to reach in order to grow.

Another Perspective

To give another prospective, I’ve pulled numbers from some of our clients (who have more realistic numbers that the top 200 brands, like Coca Cola), as well as numbers from brands that I follow on Facebook. These numbers can seen by anyone, by dividing the “People Talking About” number (publicly shown on every Facebook page) by the total number of Likes. I hope this give a better perspective one what a brand can except in terms of engagement numbers:

A FEW OF OUR CLIENTS

Tarte Advertising - 577 likes         22.1% engagement

SkinnyTaste – 58,000+ likes        6.2% engagement

European Bridal – 920 likes          12.5% engagement

Lucid Salon – 482 likes                   5.4% engagement

OTHER BRANDS ON FACEBOOK 

Birchbox - 65,000+ likes                               8.3% engagement

Cincinnati Zoo - 67,000+ likes                    2.8% engagement

The Ritzy Rose – 1,274 likes                           17.5% engagement

Kate Spade New York - 450,000+ likes      1.6% engagement

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