Only 1% of Facebook Fans truly 'engage' with a Brand : Study

Facebook has emerged as a very important marketing medium owing to the huge number of people who access it and the amount of time people spend on it. Facebook advertising features prominently when firms outline their digital marketing strategy, with some brands advertising just their Facebook Page URL than their website in hoardings and TV commercials. But does an increase in the fan count or likes in your brand fanpage guarantee engagement? A study by Australia based marketing think-tank Ehrenberg-Bass Institute suggests that only 1% of a brand's followers on Facebook actually engage with the brand.The results are based on one of Facebook's metrics 'People Talking About This'. This feature measures the interaction between followers and the fanpage in terms of likes, shares, tags, comments , mentions etc. The institute studied the top 200 brands on Facebook over a 6 week period and found the average 'People Talking About This' percentage to be 1.3%. If one removed the count of 'likes' which takes just a click and count only the more engaged forms of interaction, the percentage drops to 0.45%. This suggests that less than half a percent of a brand's followers are creating content or engaging directly with the brand.

Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a "Facebook advocate" points out that this research does not conclude that Facebook as a medium is ineffective. "People need to understand what it can do for a brand and what it can't do. Facebook doesn't really differ from mass media. It's great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic" she said in an interview to AdAge.

Source: Ad Age