Warning: You are about to lay your eyes on some of the best and most valuable data you will ever come across. I spent hours upon hours compiling secretive data that will likely blow your mind. I am not responsible for the sudden life changes my findings will surely cause.
Now that we have the obligatory warning out of the way, let me preface this post by saying I spent about 15 minutes, at most, over a span of 3 days looking at numbers that are readily available to anyone who spends any time on Facebook. The most grueling part was copying and pasting the numbers into Excel.
Facebook recently made a few changes/additions to data available on a brand’s page. One of the new changes they made was adding a “Talking About This” feature on every brand page. According to Facebook:
“People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed:
- liking your Page
- posting to your Page’s Wall
- liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums)
- answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events
- mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page
- liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.
While relatively new, this feature is quite interesting and valuable for anyone who manages a Facebook page for a brand. While browsing around a few brand’s pages that I “like” and scan each day, I noticed a common theme — most of the pages I visited had a relatively low number of “people talking about this.” So I did what any brilliant mind would do and I started to plug some numbers (aka enter into Excel). Scholarly, huh?
I took a look at 10 of the most “liked” brand pages, and even threw in a few celebrities (they’re brands, too). I then took a look at a few of the top Minnesota brands, just for the heck of it. Here are my amazing findings, that again, will likely blow your mind:
Obviously I’ve been kidding around about my “research” being scientific or scholarly. However, even with this brief glimpse, it does present some interesting data. Outside of Justin Bieber — the kids sure like them some Biebs — most of the brands I looked at had between .05% – 1.5% of their “likes” talking about them. A few brands were a bit higher, a few a bit lower, but it was pretty consistent across the board.
This got me thinking, and I came up with a few possible conclusions from the unscientific and rushed research project that I spent less than 15 minutes on:
- People “like” brands and rarely, if ever, return.
- It shows the importance of the News Feed.
- Your content isn’t as compelling as you think.
I think it can be a combination of all three; however, it’s most likely the first point. Early on, we got trigger happy with the “like” button, liked a bunch of brands, and then we simply never return to their page.
This little research project wasn’t meant to uncover the secret to Facebook success. Instead, it was simply meant to show that while we’re out there spreading the gospel of Facebook as the key to our organization’s success, we simply need to take a step back into reality a bit. I don’t want to take away the importance of Facebook — Coca Cola’s 250,000+ people “talking about this” is a pretty significant amount of eyeballs. It does indicate that while we’re claiming a lot of success on behalf of brands, the reality is there’s still a huge amount of opportunity and a lot of room for improvement.
