95 percent of all Facebook fans inactive

TLDR: Brands can activate only five percent of their fans to like or post within half a year. This was the finding of a study for which Web Excellence Forum (WebXF) analyzed Facebook presences of German companies.

Internetworld: 12.3. 2014

How do major German brands perform on the social web?
That's what the Web Excellence Forum (WebXF) corporate initiative wanted to know and examined the Facebook fan pages of companies. The Brand Advocate study focused on the brands Allianz, Bayer, Bosch, Daimler, Lufthansa, Opel and RWE with a total of 2.7 million fans.
Behavioral data from 160,000 users and content from 15,000 user posts were evaluated over a period of six months. The results of the analysis were combined with the results of a survey of 5,500 people.
The focus was on users who are repeatedly active on the Facebook fan page. The results showed that, on average, brands manage to activate just five percent of their fans within half a year. This means that they post, like or comment on a post at least once.
Conversely, this means that 95 percent of fans are not active at all. Of the active users, 15 percent repeatedly interact with a fan page. 85 percent leave it at a one-time interaction. According to the study, however, the low percentage of engaged users turns out to be strategically valuable: 80 percent of them support the brand, only four percent are critics.
Missing the target group
For some brands, there is also a gap between the intended target groups and the target groups actually reached on Facebook. According to the study, a large proportion of brand ambassadors are employees themselves. Their share averages 47 percent, while the share of customers ranges from four percent to 85 percent and averages 42 percent.
Content that fans like to pass on are interesting images for 40 percent of those surveyed. Product news (35 percent), company insights (19 percent) and stories from employees or customers (15 percent) also guarantee high interaction rates.
For Facebook itself, the number of interactions says nothing about the actual success of a brand on the platform. "Interactions are - if anything - only one factor of many. Marketers know reach and frequency are the deciding factors for the success of a campaign and ultimately for achieving real marketing goals, such as increasing brand awareness, conversion or sales," said a spokesperson for the company. "If a brand wants 26 million Germans to see its message, it is in principle irrelevant how many fans the site has or interact with the site."
The goal of the WebXF analysis was to give companies a better picture of the makeup of their fan base. "Many brand managers succumb to the transparency paradox of social media," explains Christian Bachem, co-founder of the Web Excellence Forum. "On the one hand, social media grants a level of transparency about individual users never before seen in brand communication. At the same time, there is a lack of knowledge about the composition of the fan base as a whole and the motivation of typical groups of fans." This, he said, deprives companies of the opportunity to target their communications accurately to their target groups.