How Many of Your Fans Really See, or Even Like, Your Feed Stories?

From a recent article by Robin Davey of GROWVision (via Jackie Cohen of AllFacebook):

I simply posted on my wall asking anyone who saw the post to like it. Of my 913 friends, 93 responded by clicking the like button.

I recently conducted this experiment too, and I’d like to note that it’s largely a factor of time, too. You can argue that posts age somewhat organically as other stories pop-up, but if folks are constantly liking it, it will last longer the more popular you are. So far, I’m already past 1% in 10 minutes (Robin’s estimate for liking). After 3 hours, I’m above 3%.

Tests in our lab actually show that 0.25% is an expected “clickable” ratio (against fans) for brand Facebook feeds. My personal feed extends that, but you could argue I’m very engaging (aw) clicking and posting a few times a day.

The question remains- for Facebook pages (vs. individuals), if they have X number of fans, what % of those followers will reliably interact with any given feed story? There’s a myth I’ve heard quite a bit that you have to have a high fan count to truly engage- in fact it’s quite the opposite. The large fan count pages have even more work to truly engage their following.

Robin used this sample set:

The Black Keys have 800,000 fans and they get around 800 likes per post, although they did reach 7,000 when they said ‘Lotsa Grammys”.

Justin Bieber has 22,000,000 fans and gets between 25,000 and 50,000 likes per post.

Mumford and Sons have 1,300,000 fans and have recently pulled an impressive 17,000 likes on one post that simply said, “TOUR!!!”

I think we can see reliably so far that a calculation is going to be a lot more complex than a simple single experiment. Some factors off the top of my head:
- brand recognition
- engagement on the feed
- timed events (a.k.a., the Grammy’s)
- regular posting by the brand
- level of interaction (games) and other rich content
- recency (vs. frequency) of posting

Our Community Health grading app creates an engagement score just so that brands can judge whether they’re maximizing the marketing opportunities, and the ability to compare themselves to competitors. The engagement level is a monthly assessment of the interactivity of admin and community post. Here’s the grader’s response to his sampling (and I threw in Lady Gaga for fun):

Justin Bieber has a really engaged stream, which is amazing given the sheer size. Part of it is due to the frequent posts he or his staff contribute.

Lady Gaga- she’s done quite well with 30M likes, posting on average 1 1/2 times a day with plenty of interaction on those posts, as well as others posting and commenting on each other’s posts.

The Black Keys- They have a fraction of the fans, but still because they’re not engaging that frequently, perhaps twice a week, their followers aren’t posting nor commenting and liking on their stream.

Mumford & Sons - proves the point that if you don’t ever write, no matter how many fans, it’s not going to result in an engaged audience. Granted, they announced they weren’t going to keep their page up.

If you have done Robin’s experiment, or have a comment on the metrics posted here, I’d love to hear them.

Category: Analysis, Virality