Already-active social media users attract more brand fans
When it comes to getting fans to “like” brand Facebook pages, it helps if they see others actively commenting, liking and connecting with the brand there.
A June 2012 study from Google-owned social media management company Wildfire analyzed the impact that more active social media users—brand advocates and sharers—had on brand Facebook pages. Wildfire analyzed 10,000 Facebook campaigns and looked at the top 10% best-performing campaigns, which came from nearly 700 different brands, to see what helped them succeed.
The top-performing brand pages, compared to average brand pages, had a higher percentage of fans considered “sharers” participating in and then noting the campaign to their networks, and greater shares of “brand advocates,” who shared and had enough clout to influence their networks. For average Facebook brand pages, 83% of fans were considered “joiners” who just participated in a campaign without spreading the word about it. For the top-performing pages, only 61% of fans were joiners, while 34.3% were sharers and 4.7% were brand advocates. For average Facebook pages, only 1.5% of fans were brand advocates.
When a user sees lots of activity happening on a brand page, it is attractive and makes them want to get involved, Wildfire found. For the top-performing pages, fan growth was 79.58% from September 2011 to June 2012, while average Facebook brand pages only saw 7.67% fan growth. Engagement growth was 90.20% for top-performing pages, compared to 31.78% for average pages.
One way brands can boost fan growth and engagement is by finding their advocates and super fans, and then determining what type of content actually gets them engaged with the brand page. In its study, Wildfire encouraged companies to run multiple engagement applications simultaneously, use clear calls-to-action, post images and leverage multiple social platforms in order to help achieve that goal.
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Check out today’s other articles, “SMBs Hold Marketing Budgets Steady” and “Marketers in South Korea Bulk Up Social Media Budgets.”