Ad Age recently published an article entitled Study: Only 1% of Facebook ‘Fans’ Engage With Brands. A first glance at data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank working for brands such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, one might assume the buzz around the Facebook marketing revolution might simply be hype. Looking at the top 200 brands on Facebook, the new People Talking About This metric (posts, comments, tags, shares and other ways a user of the social network can interact with branded pages), the overall proportion of 1.3% of fans who actually share something about the brand seams pretty anemic.
But as is the case with all statistics, the numbers can be misleading. Defenders of Facebook’s marketing value argue that PTA captures only a specific type of engagement, ignoring the value of impressions created by Facebook’s massive reach. This is a valid point. After all, we’ve long placed value in impressions from other mass media channels. It seams clear that PTA is an interesting and important statistic that might provide insight into the behavior of a brand’s most loyal users, but it says nothing about the larger audience made up of the long tail.