1. Study: Only 1% of Facebook 'Fans' Engage With Brands | Digita... http://adage.com/article/digital/study-1-facebook-fans-engage-b...
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DIGITAL
Study: Only 1% of Facebook 'Fans' Engage
With Brands
Not Many Fans Are Creating Content, But That Might Not Be a Bad Thing
By: Matthew Creamer Published: January 27, 2012
For a few years now, brands have been touting frothy Facebook "like" numbers as evidence of their
social-media acumen. But how many of those fans are actually bothering to take part in
conversation with brands?
Not too many, as it turns out.
BIG IN PRINT
Slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with the The Agency A-List
brands, according to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think
tank 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 Talking
About This, the awkwardly-named running count of likes, posts, comments, tags, shares and other
ways a user of the social network can interact with branded pages. It was unveiled last fall as a way
of 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 top
Agency of the Year McGarryBowen Proves Solid
200 brands on Facebook over a six-week period back in October and they found the percentage of and Reliable Beat Fast and Furious
People Talking About This to overall fans to be 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, which only requires Ad Age's Agency A-List Issue: Ten Agencies to
Watch in 2012
a click and in the minds of the researchers are akin to TV ratings, and isolate for more engaged Droga5 Is Creativity's Agency of the Year
forms of interaction, you're left within an even smaller number: 0.45%. That means less than half a The Creativity A-List: The 10 Most Creative
Shops of the Year
percent of people who identify themselves as like a brand actually bother to create any content Many Brands Bid for Product Placement on
around it. 'Modern Family,' but So Few Make It
Fox's 'Touch' Inks Historic Global Deal With
Unilever
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 for Ad Age Whitepapers
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a "Facebook advocate." "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 Mobile Marketing Volume 4:
M-Commerce
is just unrealistic."
In the background here is the thinking of Andrew Ehrenberg, the late mathematician who was highly
skeptical of conventional marketing wisdom. In dense statistically-oriented papers, he cast doubt on
concepts such as brand loyalty and was never sold on the persuasive power of advertising. Now his
disciples advocate achieving broad reach through mass media. Brand growth, they maintain, is
attained not by reaching a few loyal fans but a larger number of light and medium buyers. In this
understanding of the marketing and media worlds, social is just another media channel useful for its
reach rather than any notion of engagement.
This research jibes with that thinking, as does a separate study from Ms. Nelson-Field looking at the
distribution of buying behavior among Facebook fan bases. In that study, she used web-based
consumer panels to examine the behavior of Facebook fans of two unnamed repeat-purchased
brands, in the chocolate and soft-drink categories. The key finding was a much greater occurrence Is it a phone, a wallet or a mall? Mobile
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2. Study: Only 1% of Facebook 'Fans' Engage With Brands | Digita... http://adage.com/article/digital/study-1-facebook-fans-engage-b...
of heavy buyers in the Facebook population than in a more general population of customers. The phones and tablets make it easier for
study also found that purchase frequency didn't increase after someone became a fan. consumers to research and buy. Learn
who's already buying, how consume...
More
In other words, Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers rather than the more casual
shoppers that a brands needs to reach in order to grow. Again, unless you're someone who
believes marketing on Facebook alone constitutes a full strategy or you're lining up for the inevitable CREATIVITY PICKS
Check-In With a Hip Thrust With the
Facebook IPO, this isn't all bad news. Facebook does provide good reach and its audience of loyal
'LikeBelt' Prototype
fans 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 disproportionate
amount of effort into engagement and strategies to get people to talk about a brand, when you
should be spending more time getting more light buyers."
Request a Reprint of this article. "Liking" things gets a real-world spin with this
prototype out of Pittsburgh-based Deeplocal. The
"Like Belt" uses near-field communication
COMMENTS RSS feed of comments technology to register "likes" when you are walking
around. You just have to do a bit of thrusting.
Matthew Wurst
New York, NY Unfortunately this study only incorporates the public People Talking about This
metric, which is only one set of unique users who may be interacting with brands.
# 1 - Jan 27, 2012 11:40 AM
What PTAT does not incorporate is the number of individuals who have clicked on
a 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 degree
reach, to make a definitive statement that only 1% of fans are engaging in with
brands is inaccurate and demonstrates a lack of understanding of Facebook
metrics.
Reply 0 +3
Bob Clark
Chester Springs, PA Interesting finding - looks like social for brands is just another form of media - less
about conversations
# 2 - Jan 27, 2012 11:40 AM
Bob
24kmarketing.com
Reply 0
WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
How Volkswagen Conducted Its
Ron Schott Canine Chorus
Seattle, WA That was my first thought as well, Matthew. Passalong isn't necessarily the best
way to measure interaction. Traditional advertising metrics don't point to the
# 3 - Jan 27, 2012 11:57 AM
number of times a person sees a television ad and then goes to a friend with "oh
man, I just saw this ad, you have to hear about it." No, they focus on impressions
of brand messaging - something that's completely being missed here if you're only
looking at People Talking About numbers.
Reply 0 +1
Anna Choi
Blacksburg, VA The way "f-commerce" is impacting brands is a transitional stage but this finding is
a start to how brands will slowly but surely become a part of a consumer's daily The Making of 'The Bark Side': Ad Age Talks to the
# 4 - Jan 27, 2012 11:58 AM People Behind the Pup-Filled Follow-up to 'The
life. It's great to look into the numbers and their meanings while at the same time
attempting to increase them. Force'.
Reply 0 Want your agency included in Ad
Age's Agency Report 2012?
The report will cover more than 900 agencies. If
Joel Rubinson your agency didn't receive a questionnaire, email
huntington, NY I first published results like this in a blog 8 months ago where I showed that a tiny AgencyReport@AdAge.com.
percent of people who like a fan page ever go back to it.
# 5 - Jan 27, 2012 12:11 PM
Evidence is here:
ANA Annual Meeting 2011
http://blog.joelrubinson.net/2011/04/how-do-people-spend-time-with-your-brand/
Advice to marketers from Facebook's COO and
When you count up impressions in the news feed and compare that to owned other insights from this year's conference.
media, it turns out that Facebook has nothing to do with engagement which
actually comes from owned media. It delivers impressions but only 5% or so are on
MOST READ
Facebook at the time the update hits their stream.
JC Penney Reinvents Department-Store Retailing
Reply 0 +1 Google+ Prepares to Revolutionize the Local
Landscape
GE Study Proves Consumers Respond More to
Kern Lewis Shared Content Than to Paid Placements
Castro Valley, CA I think these findings (Joel's linked article, too) are valid criticisms. So, we all just
Why Marketers Are Learning to Embrace
have to manage the Facebook opportunity properly, and test ways to extract value Sustainability Through Social Media
# 6 - Jan 27, 2012 12:38 PM
from its massive database of users. Here is my latest example:
Turns Out Consumers Really Do Care About the
I have a client, SBIG, that caters to a very narrow target market: Amateur
Data You're Collecting
astronomers. Out of 800 million FB users, less than 1 million have flagged
themselves as fans of astronomy. So, FB has found some of the needles in our MOST COMMENTED
haystack, and having a company page gives me access to them via an ad MOST EMAILED
2 of 4 1/27/12 12:54 PM

3. Study: Only 1% of Facebook 'Fans' Engage With Brands | Digita... http://adage.com/article/digital/study-1-facebook-fans-engage-b...
campaign. RELATED CONTENT
Second, we need to build "likes" for selfish reasons: The casual visitor to our page
must be impressed. We just started our page, and we are anxious to get over 1000 Sheryl Sandberg Touts Facebook's Role in
likes so that visitors don't say "geez, not many people have bothered to like SBIG. Stimulating Economy
I'm not sticking around either!" Facebook Branches Out Past 'Likes' with 60 New
Third, we have a very loyal fan base, and some of them (not all by any stretch) are Lifestyle Apps
on Facebook. We have started to interact with them in meaningful ways, and hope
Facebook Looks to Rebrand News Feed Ads
to make our company page a place for them to share the wonderful images they
have taken with our cameras. This is Your Facebook Timeline on Drugs
Facebook will never be the central piece of our marketing mix, but it does appear More Than Just Numbers: The Brands With the
to have value in helping to build and maintain our loyal customer base, even if Top Relationship Quality on Facebook
each of our Likers (can I still say "fans"?) drops by only occasionally.
Reply 0
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