Facebook is the world’s largest social network. With the latest report from Nielsen showing that Facebook still dominating the number of users, the number of unique visitors in every platform (PC, mobile app, and mobile web), and even the number of total minutes spent on, Facebook surely is the place to start your conquest to social media presence for your brand, isn’t it?
However, a recent study by Recommend.ly shows some ugly findings about Facebook Pages. The study concludes that 2 out of 3 Facebook Pages are inactive in some ways. About 63.9% pages have no cover photo, 70.1% pages make zero post a month, and 83.4% pages never participated in any conversation.
Sampling no less than 5.76 million Facebook Pages with 10 or more likes, folks at Recommend.ly then narrowed this sample to 2.94 million pages to further understand the behavior of pages across various categories. Facebook has a default set of top level categories and around 160 sub categories for Facebook Pages. The top level categories are brand/product, community, company/organization, entertainment, local business, and personal brand. This categorization seems to favor more business entities. Community pages aside, the other five categories are representing businesses in some ways.
Ironically, the study finds that it is the community pages that contribute the largest number of Facebook Pages. Combined with personal brand pages, the two categories make more than half of Facebook Pages. Brand and company pages, on the other hand, only represent less than 20% when combined. The table below shows a complete list of the category distribution:
Loosely based on this original categorization, Recommend.ly selected nine sub-categories to observe. These sub-categories are: musician/brand, actor/director, and public figure from “personal brands” category; local business, company/organization, restaurants and spa from “business” category; and community. This table shows posting habit of these nine categories:
As mentioned earlier, a staggering 70.1% of these pages never post any update in the month the study was conducted.
What about Indonesia? Of course, the study does not break the data down to country level. However, I did find an interesting statistic from Social Bakers. The top 10 Facebook Pages in Indonesia, as I write this post, is as follows:
Although this is not a comprehensive method to really measure the landscape of Indonesia’s Facebook Pages, the top 10 is telling us something. Excluding Batik Indonesia, which is an online batik shop, the other nine are well known brands in television. RCTI and SCTV are television channel themselves. Opera Van Java, Inbox, and Dahsyat are TV shows, while Mario Teguh, Ungu, Vierra, and Last Child are arguably celebrities with a lot of TV presence. The table also shows a relatively low conversion rate from fans to PTA (which stands for “people talking about”) number. The seven million Opera Van Java fans, for instance, can only generate around ninety thousands conversations about it.
Altogether, are these stats enough to conclude that brands are abandoning Facebook? Do brands only create Facebook Pages just for the sake of having them? Is Facebook Page really a place to go to build your brand’s presence in social media? While I have yet to be convinced about this, the stats simply do not help Facebook’s cause.
