Having a business page on Facebook has always proven to be a good way to raise awareness of your company or to advertise to those that like the page. By making a page on Facebook, the real goal of any business is to make the number of fans it has grow exponentially. Sure, there are a few ways to do so, but the most effective would be through shares, comments, and likes, all of which come from the more active Facebook users. Yesterday, eMarketer released information from a study performed by Wildfire, the media management company that was recently acquired by Google, gives a little more insight into just how much impact these active “sharers” have on Facebook marketing campaigns.
After analyzing 10,000 Facebook campaigns, Wildfire found the top 10% best-performing campaigns to find out what it was that was making them so successful. They found that it was the higher number of “sharers” that these company pages had over the average brand pages that helped their campaigns so much. These “sharers” are those that share the advertisements and campaigns to their networks. These companies also had more “brand advocates,” or those who did the same things as sharers, but had much more influence on their individual networks.
In eMarketer’s chart, they compare average brand pages on Facebook with the top-performers on the network, in terms of the amounts of sharers and advocates in their fan bases. For average Facebook brand pages, only about 1.5% of their fan bases are advocates of the brand, while for top-performing pages, there was an average of 4.7%. As for sharers, the top-performing Facebook pages had 34.3% of their fan base composed of them, while the average page only had about 15.4%. Out of their entire fan bases, the top-performing pages had 61% of fans that were simply joiners, and average pages has 83%.
As a result to these numbers, eMarketer writes that,
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.
Clearly, these more active Facebook fans are the ones responsible for a lot of success in Facebook marketing campaigns.
Brands need to start finding out who the “super fans” are and then using this information to keep them sharing their content. To find out what exactly interests these sharers and advocates and gets them to act in favor of the brand would be a good start to creating fan growth on a Facebook page. Although it is partially out of the hands of a company when it comes to fan sharing and advocating, there are ways to influence it. Since these numbers clearly show how influential “super fans” can be, they can not be overlooked when dealing with Facebook marketing campaigns.
