Which Brands Have the Most Active Facebook Fans? Analyzing the Top 50

It’s one thing to have a large fan base, as all the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages do, but as a page’s raw numbers increase the percentage of active fans decreases. It’s a natural progression.

At the same time, the way you use your page is fundamental to its success. How often can you drive visitors to your website? Or garner posts? Or be tagged? Or drive a sale? Whatever metric you use, having fans is step one and getting them to react to you is step two. How often you post is important, too and I’ve ranked the Top 50 on that metric in an earlier post on frequency and impressions.

But in this post, I’ll rank the best performers among the largest branded fan pages in terms of “active fans” and “fan actions per post per 10,000 fans.” It’s another way to slice the data provided to us through Expion, a social media management tool.

The data looked at page performance from May 1, 2011 to July 31, 2011. Any fan counts were collected on August 1, 2011. (Do note that Expion cannot see private Facebook data, so geo-targeted posts or posts from private pages [such as those with an age restriction] are not included. I don’t believe that has any impact on this particular data set, however.)

What is an “Active Fan”?

For purposes of this analysis, an active fan is any fan that comments on a company post or writes their own post on a company’s wall.

Note that fans that like a post are not included as active fans in this definition. Later in this post, we’ll rank the top pages by “Fan Actions,” which will include likes and comments.

Ranking the Most Active Fan Pages

Now, with new data from Expion, we’re able to rank for the first time ever the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages by percent of active fans.

Here are the top 10 pages in terms of active fans:

  1. Dr. Pepper (147,462 active fans out of 10,413,502): 1.42% active fans
  2. Sony Ericsson (69,976 active fans out of 5,489,372): 1.27% active fans
  3. Walt Disney (91,391 active fans out of 7,195,124): 1.27% active fans
  4. Taco Bell (92,568 active fans out of 7,426,976): 1.25% active fans
  5. Walmart (77,392 active fans out of 8,493,630): 0.91% active fans
  6. National Geographic (57,961 active fans out of 7,055,930): 0.82% active fans
  7. Zoosk (44,491 active fans out of 5,523,311): 0.81% active fans
  8. Blackberry (61,492 active fans out of 7,894,725): 0.78% active fans
  9. Mountain Dew (44,459 active fans out of 5,942,900): 0.75% active fans
  10. Disneyland (73,047 active fans out of 10,499,931): 0.70% active fans

What about Likes?

Another way to look at the data is to rank these pages based on how many likes and comments they get. One of my favorite ways to do this it to rank average fan actions per 10,000 fans. This helps normalize the data across the pages regardless of fan size. While being bigger is an advantage, it’s also interesting to see how people are performing with the fans they currently have. To compute your own ranking, here’s the formula:

([(Total fan comments + total fan likes)/number of posts]/total fan count)*10000

In other words, average fan actions per post, divided by total fan count times 10,000 will get you the average fan actions per post per 10,000 fans.

Most Actions Per Fan (Likes & Comments)

Analyzing the same data set from Expion in this way gives us a different view of who is doing well.

Here are the top 10 pages in terms of fan actions per post per 10,000 fans:

  1. BMW: (13,552.21 fan actions per post with 6,224,132 fans): 21.77
  2. Burberry: (11,939.16 fan actions per post with 7,294,850 fans): 16.37
  3. Disney: (33,378.97 fan actions per post with 27,466,951 fans): 12.15
  4. National Geographic: (6,009.91 fan actions per post with 6,917,562 fans): 8.69
  5. Zoosk: (4,524.67 fan actions per post with 5,291,355 fans): 8.55
  6. Disney Pixar: (8,304.89 fan actions per post with 10,111,937 fans): 8.21
  7. Ferrero Rocher: (8,295 fan actions on 1 post with 11,874,232 fans): 7.52
  8. Nutella: (7,845.83 fan actions per post with 10,883,529 fans): 7.21
  9. Sony Ericcson: (3,687.13 fan actions per post with 5,388,665 fans): 6.84
  10. Zara: (6,479.73 fan actions per post with 9,764,522 fans): 6.64

How Are You Performing?

Look at your data. How are you performing against these very large pages. Assuming your page is smaller than those in the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages, you should have higher percentages of active fans and higher numbers of fan actions per post per 10,000 fans. If not, you may want to revisit your posting strategy to drive more interaction, as it should lead to more fan growth.



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