study- only 1% of facebook 'fans' engage with brands | digital - advertising age.pdf

By: Matthew Creamer Published: January 27, 2012

DIGITAL

Study: Only 1% of Facebook 'Fans' EngageWith BrandsNot Many Fans Are Creating Content, But That Might Not Be a Bad Thing

For a few years now, brands have been touting frothy Facebook "like" numbers as evidence of theirsocial-media acumen. But how many of those fans are actually bothering to take part inconversation with brands?

Not too many, as it turns out.

Slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with thebrands, according to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing thinktank that counts Procter & Gamble , Coca-Cola and other major advertisers as its supporters.

To get to these findings, the researchers used one of Facebook's own metrics, People TalkingAbout This, the awkwardly-named running count of likes, posts, comments, tags, shares and otherways a user of the social network can interact with branded pages. It was unveiled last fall as a wayof giving advertisers a sharper look at at the level of activity on their pages.

Researchers for the institute looked at this metric as a proportion of overall fan growth of the top200 brands on Facebook over a six-week period back in October and they found the percentage ofPeople Talking About This to overall fans to be 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, which only requiresa click and in the minds of the researchers are akin to TV ratings, and isolate for more engagedforms of interaction, you're left within an even smaller number: 0.45%. That means less than half apercent of people who identify themselves as like a brand actually bother to create any contentaround it.

You might assume these are damning numbers. But this isn't necessarily the case.

"I don't think it's a bad thing," said Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate forEhrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a "Facebook advocate." "People need tounderstand what it can do for a brand and what it can't do. Facebook doesn't really differ from massmedia. It's great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnightis just unrealistic."

In the background here is the thinking of Andrew Ehrenberg, the late mathematician who was highlyskeptical of conventional marketing wisdom. In dense statistically-oriented papers, he cast doubt onconcepts such as brand loyalty and was never sold on the persuasive power of advertising. Now hisdisciples advocate achieving broad reach through mass media. Brand growth, they maintain, isattained not by reaching a few loyal fans but a larger number of light and medium buyers. In thisunderstanding of the marketing and media worlds, social is just another media channel useful for itsreach rather than any notion of engagement.

This research jibes with that thinking, as does a separate study from Ms. Nelson-Field looking at thedistribution of buying behavior among Facebook fan bases. In that study, she used web-basedconsumer panels to examine the behavior of Facebook fans of two unnamed repeat-purchasedbrands, in the chocolate and soft-drink categories. The key finding was a much greater occurrence

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RSS feed of comments

Matthew WurstNew York, NY

# 1 - Jan 27, 2012 11:40 AM

Bob ClarkChester Springs, PA

# 2 - Jan 27, 2012 11:40 AM

Ron SchottSeattle, WA

# 3 - Jan 27, 2012 11:57 AM

Anna ChoiBlacksburg, VA

# 4 - Jan 27, 2012 11:58 AM

Joel Rubinsonhuntington, NY

# 5 - Jan 27, 2012 12:11 PM

Kern LewisCastro Valley, CA

# 6 - Jan 27, 2012 12:38 PM

of heavy buyers in the Facebook population than in a more general population of customers. Thestudy also found that purchase frequency didn't increase after someone became a fan.

In other words, Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers rather than the more casualshoppers that a brands needs to reach in order to grow. Again, unless you're someone whobelieves marketing on Facebook alone constitutes a full strategy or you're lining up for the inevitableFacebook IPO, this isn't all bad news. Facebook does provide good reach and its audience of loyalfans is good for market research and word-of-mouth advocacy.

If there's an overall caution, it's against, in the words of Ms. Nelson-Field, "putting a disproportionateamount of effort into engagement and strategies to get people to talk about a brand, when youshould be spending more time getting more light buyers."

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COMMENTS

+30Reply

Unfortunately this study only incorporates the public People Talking about Thismetric, which is only one set of unique users who may be interacting with brands.What PTAT does not incorporate is the number of individuals who have clicked ona link, viewed a photo or video or visited the brand page. While the creation of"stories," which is what PTAT measures, is important for second and even degreereach, to make a definitive statement that only 1% of fans are engaging in withbrands is inaccurate and demonstrates a lack of understanding of Facebookmetrics.

0Reply

Interesting finding - looks like social for brands is just another form of media - lessabout conversations

Bob24kmarketing.com

+10Reply

That was my first thought as well, Matthew. Passalong isn't necessarily the bestway to measure interaction. Traditional advertising metrics don't point to thenumber of times a person sees a television ad and then goes to a friend with "ohman, I just saw this ad, you have to hear about it." No, they focus on impressionsof brand messaging - something that's completely being missed here if you're onlylooking at People Talking About numbers.

0Reply

The way "f-commerce" is impacting brands is a transitional stage but this finding isa start to how brands will slowly but surely become a part of a consumer's dailylife. It's great to look into the numbers and their meanings while at the same timeattempting to increase them.

+10Reply

I first published results like this in a blog 8 months ago where I showed that a tinypercent of people who like a fan page ever go back to it.Evidence is here:http://blog.joelrubinson.net/2011/04/how-do-people-spend-time-with-your-brand/

When you count up impressions in the news feed and compare that to ownedmedia, it turns out that Facebook has nothing to do with engagement whichactually comes from owned media. It delivers impressions but only 5% or so are onFacebook at the time the update hits their stream.

I think these findings (Joel's linked article, too) are valid criticisms. So, we all justhave to manage the Facebook opportunity properly, and test ways to extract valuefrom its massive database of users. Here is my latest example:I have a client, SBIG, that caters to a very narrow target market: Amateurastronomers. Out of 800 million FB users, less than 1 million have flaggedthemselves as fans of astronomy. So, FB has found some of the needles in ourhaystack, and having a company page gives me access to them via an ad

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0Reply

campaign.Second, we need to build "likes" for selfish reasons: The casual visitor to our pagemust be impressed. We just started our page, and we are anxious to get over 1000likes so that visitors don't say "geez, not many people have bothered to like SBIG.I'm not sticking around either!"Third, we have a very loyal fan base, and some of them (not all by any stretch) areon Facebook. We have started to interact with them in meaningful ways, and hopeto make our company page a place for them to share the wonderful images theyhave taken with our cameras.Facebook will never be the central piece of our marketing mix, but it does appearto have value in helping to build and maintain our loyal customer base, even ifeach of our Likers (can I still say "fans"?) drops by only occasionally.

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study- only 1% of facebook 'fans' engage with brands | digital - advertising age.pdf

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