NO STRONG CORRELATION BETWEEN FACEBOOK LIKES AND 'PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS' FOR BRAND PAGES

By Wave on June 27, 2012

WaveMetrix analysis of how brands perform across Facebook’s two key metrics reveals that there is not always a strong connection between brand community growth and user-motivated interactions with the brand.

Added to the site last October, Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This’ metric measures how much user activity a brand’s page has generated over the past week, and is designed to complement Facebook Likes by showing not only how popular a page is, but how effective it is at getting fans talking, or how much user activity the brand is driving.

WaveMetrix analysis of 1,000 popular brand Facebook pages throughout May and June 2012 suggests that there is not as strong a correlation between the amount of Likes a page has and its ‘People Talking About This’ number. While some pages with huge follower counts generate relatively little user engagement, other smaller pages can generate a great deal of activity. Levels of People Talking About This tend to be lower on Tuesday – Thursday than at other times in the week, suggesting the prime time to engage current fans is Friday – Monday (while new Likes are most likely to be garnered on Fridays)

This demonstrates how a large fanbase is not necessarily an engaged fanbase, and smaller pages may be promoting a greater amount of consumer interaction than significantly larger rivals.

Of the 1,000 brand Facebook pages shown here, the relationship between Likes and PTAT varies considerably, with no real trend emerging as page size increases: