Neworld, Great relationships build great brands

Earlier today I was a guest on Alex Gibsons show Persuaders on Dublin City FM. We spoke about fan engagement on Facebook and briefly looked at a few examples. The subject of fan engagement was on my mind from an earlier post this week so I thought that might be something good to run with.

Fangager

Just how engaged are your fans? Or do you even consider that statistic when looking at your page. As I mentioned many brands focus on the headline stat of ‘how many fans’ the page has as an indicator of performance, when in reality that’s not a useful measure when taken on its own. I guess the emphasis on that sole statistic is encouraged by sights like Your Social Media Monitor and Social Bakers which produce league table style rankings based on the number of fans. Fangager is a new service which looks at how active your fans are on your page.

Man UTD. ‘V’ Lady Gaga

A recent post on Mashable to launch the Fangager service actually looked at the level of activity on a number of high profile pages. The post mentions Man UTD with 9.9 million fans and Lady Gaga with 29 million fans. If success is based solely on the number of fans then Lady Gaga is the out and out winner, but if you look at the number of active fans Man Utd. trump Gaga by 256,000 fans to her 148,000. According to the post Man Utd have one of the highest level of engaged fans on Facebook.

Those Numbers Are Surprisingly Low

To think that out of Gaga’s 29 million fans just 148,000 are active seems surprisingly low. I would be surprised if active fans on the Facebook Insights for either Utd. or Gaga would be so low. Fangager seems to measure just likes and comments, but doesn’t measure fans who click on your page, links in their newsfeed to your brands content, amount of shares, tags etc.

The Fans Fangager Misses

I did a test on a number of pages I admin and there does seem to be a difference when comparing monthly active fan figures from Fangager and Facebook Insights. While Fangager offers an interesting measurement, it doesn’t take into account a lot of the ‘silent’ but active people on a page. I’ll give you an example. I admin a page where regular video content is posted, last week a new video was posted and fans were asked to ‘share’ it. While the post picked up likes and/or comments from 50 different fans, over 150 fans actually shared the video – but in Fangager these shares are unaccounted for, as are people who watched the video in their newsfeed but didn’t comment or ‘like’ it.

What Fangager Can Do

The best use of the Fangager service is to measure how active competitors pages are. Plus the service will list your top 10 fans based on how many comments and likes they have made – which is handy information to have. However, the analysis is only based on fans who click like or comment and not the fans who are silently but still keeping up with your communication so should be considered active. As with all of these measurement services, knowing their flaws will help put context on their results.

Facebook Insights Still Best

There are a number of measurement tools for pages (8 others listed here), Fangager is one of the few to measure beyond the headline figure. In my opinion Facebook Insights still remains the best to analyse a pages performance from month to month to compare what works and what doesn’t work. You won’t have access to competitors information, but you will get an understanding of how your page is actually performing

Don’t know how to use Facebook Insights yet? This handy guide from Facebook will help.