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There’s been lots of discussion in the digital marketing community this week about fan engagement on Faceook. See Smart Insights – 95% of Facebook posts ignored by brands, Econsultancy’s Companies respond to just 5% of questions on Facebook and Social Media Insights The suprisingly obvious way to keep your fans engaged.

 

This discussion came a couple of weeks after Facebook launched its new “Talking about this” widget. Coincidently I had upped the ante considerably on one of the Facebook pages I manage and we’ve seen a significant increase in engagement.

 

With 800 million active users on Facebook, we are all increasingly accustomed to “liking” brands and commenting on status updates whenever we login to our favourite social network. Facebook is now the second most visited website after Google in many countries. I love Mark Stuart’s CIM Shape the Agenda paper that gives all the justification you will ever need for a Facebook page.

 

At Musicademy we’re finding that people would increasingly prefer to comment on our Facebook page status updates rather than come over to the blog and comment there. That’s fine – we’ll continue to post on both platforms and we’ll continue with some Facebook only activity such as the questions, fill in the gaps updates, polls and live online events that we’ve been using recently. It makes sense to be on a platform where people feel at home and offer them the option of daily updates to their wall rather than a bunch of posts emailed to them each week.

 

There’s an old adage in business that “Turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity”. In terms of websites, blogs and Facebook pages that saying becomes “Likes are vanity. Engagement is sanity”. How many brands, celebrities and organisations have you “liked” on Facebook in the last year? How many of their pages do you ever actually visit now? Research from Pagelever.com suggests that less than 10% of fans ever see brand updates to their wall. And the Facebook “Edgerank algorithm” means that you are only really likely to see brand page updates if you have recently interacted with the page (i.e. by liking a status update, sharing it or making a comment).

 

This “engagement” is the holy grail for brands online and I’m pleased to say that the research I carried out this week shows that Musicademy is one of the most engaged brands in the online worship community – that’s the somewhat specialist niche market where we work. Facebook’s new “Talking About This” counter in the left hand side of fan pages is an important new metric – far more valuable than the number above it showing total fan numbers. Its easy to get people to join your community – that just takes a (sometimes incentivised) click. Far harder to get them to continue to like and talk to you. Here’s my research. I’m proud to say that both the “top” engaged pages are pages I manage.

Facebook Page Engagement Analysis
Brand	Number of fans	Fan numbers engaging	Percentage Engagement
Musicademy	1782	100	5.6%
Worship Backing Band	82	6	7.3%
Worship Central	2480	59	2.4%
Worship Together	21974	215	1.0%
Integrity	9490	206	2.2%
Lifeway	1399	22	1.6%
Paul Baloche	41601	361	0.9%
Kingsway	1233	7	0.6%
Hillsong Church	62184	1771	2.8%
Vicky Beeching	3513	36	1.0%

 

As I write this our latest little Facebook question “In-ear monitoring. Yes or No?” has rocketed up the likes, comments and fan numbers. And its been so good to hear the range of opinions and experiences out there. Clearly fans are more comfortable with a brief comment on Facebook than the perhaps more daunting comment on a blog post.

 

This post is written by Marie Page, owner of ecommerce business Musicademy, author of the blog 'Using Conversational Media', lecturer and Senior CAM examiner.

You can follow Marie on Twitter @Marie_Page or visit her Facebook page here