Which brand in South Africa holds the enviable position as having the best Facebook page in the country? This is a critical question all social media planners and managers should ask themselves when planning their strategies.
HaveYouHeard’s joint managing director, Jason Stewart, takes you through his thinking when he is asked the same question by a client.
· Likes?
The first step is to get a grip on what makes a great Facebook page. In HaveYouHeard’s opinion, it is not all about ‘likes’. Likes mean very little, as the majority of those who have liked a page forget that they have and seldom visit that page again. In fact, the average return rate in South Africa is very low with only 2% of any given brand’s Facebook community actually returning to the page and engaging with it.
· Engagement?
Possibly the best indicator for a good performing page is ‘engagement’. The quickest way to determine engagement is to divide the number of ‘People Talking About This’ by the number of Total Fans. This only, however, provides an indication of engagement as the number can be boosted by paid-for new likes.
The true indicator for engagement, and thereby best performance, is engagement per post; in other words, how many post likes, comments and shares are taking place on your page (this should also be based on natural engagement, not competition or incentivised engagement)
To find South Africa’s best performing Facebook page, we therefore looked for the page that had generated the most interactions within their community. By default, this meant that the bigger the page was, the more likely it was to have higher interactions.
Using Social Bakers Analytics tool, we pulled reports on the largest 40 Facebook pages in South Africa (we excluded smaller pages, with high engagement rates because we wanted to identify South Africa’s best performing page based on generating the most total interactions in number, not as a percentage of total community size.)
· Results?
The table below lists the 20 largest pages in South Africa as of November 16, based on Total Likes and only looking at fans from South Africa, as follows:
The next table lists the top performing pages using Total Interactions (2rd column), and provides a more meaningful picture of which brands are doing well relative to their community size. In this instance, auto brands are very strong (5 in top 20).
We also looked at the type of interaction taking place on the page.
In the case of the auto pages, there was an enormous amount of passion and interest expressed by these fans. Most people would regard the topics they talk about as rather ordinary, but these are fans who absolutely love almost everything about these cars.
By contrast, when it came to the service brands, enquiries and service issues accounted for this interaction.
It therefore stands to reason that measuring ‘sentiment’ is important when determining which is South Africa’s best Facebook page.
· Content quality?
One of the measures of great content is Shares, so we opted to track which page had the most ‘shares’, as shares are indicative of this and are the highest form of flattery for a brand.
The table below highlights that What’s for Dinner does very well (its recipes are shared a lot) followed by Big Concerts. Again, the auto brands did well, with fans sharing car image after car image after car image.
· Comments about a post?
Comments about a post are regarded as second in importance, after sharing; but are still a great indication of good content. Many brands are generating this high comment amount through running competitions, and quick quiz response type posts.
However, we must note the great work done by Cadbury in engaging with its community and keeping the comment conversation going on past the first response.
