Only 6% of Fans Engage With a Brand’s Facebook Page

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Big brands like to tout the number of fans they have on Facebook, but a new study suggests they may want to start focusing more on the core audience who actually engage with their Page.

On average, just 6% of fans engage with a brand’s Facebook Page via likes, comments, polls and other means, according to a study from Napkin Labs, a Facebook app developer that works with brands and agencies. Of those fans that did, the average engagement was the equivalent of less than one like over the course of the eight weeks the study was conducted.

Napkin Labs analyzed fan engagement for more than 50 brand pages, including consumer electronics companies, retailers and more, with between 200,000 to 1 million fans each. The researcher found that having more likes doesn’t necessarily mean having more engagement. In fact, the more Facebook fans a brand has, the lower the percentage of engaged fans tends to be. For example, brands with between 900,000 to 1 million fans had 60% less engagement than brands with 500,000-600,000 fans.

What really drives the engagement on a brand’s page appears to be the core group of devoted fans — or what Napkin Labs refers to as “superfans.” The study found that, on average, the engagement of each one of a brand’s 20 most engaged fans is equal to that of 75 average fans. Each month, the so-called superfan likes 10 posts, shares five pieces of content and comments once. What’s more, these fans tend to get significantly more likes and comments on their posts than average fans, which helps drive up engagement on the brand’s page even more.

“Every business has to measure what they do and make sure that it is effective. Likes can be part of that measurement, but we need to start looking beyond that a bit, and start looking in more depth at what fans are actually doing,” Riley Gibson, the co-founder and CEO of Napkin Labs, told Mashable. As part of this, Gibson argues that brands need to focus on interacting more with their existing fan base rather than just focusing on growing their numbers.

Indeed, this may become even more important soon as reports suggest that Facebook has tweaked its EdgeRank algorithm, which determines how much content from advertisers appears in a user’s news feed. As a result, some brands have reportedly seen their reach decline on Facebook. However, engaging more with devoted fans could help brands broaden their reach on the social network.

“If you can get fans involved, get them talking about the brand, the engagements of each of those fans gets pushed to their friends feeds,” Gibson said. “So you can actually build more presence in the news feed by engaging your core audience.”