Understanding facebook analytics: No of Fans Vs. people talking about this Vs. Engaged Users

-->

This has always been a subject of debate for social media analysts. While no. of fans surely suggests popularity of any brand, No. of people talking about that page shows how many of them actually care about brand.

Brands are always excited about number of fans on their Facebook page. In fact, this is the first question most of brand managers ask to each other. It’s a conversation starter among social media enthusiasts & big headache for Social Media agencies. Today, we wanted to dive deeper in to this metric and explore what actually matters for any brand on facebook. We have seen lot of reports & research articles floating on Internet, focusing on no. of fans as important parameter.

But, there are some obvious areas, which needs to be explored once you see million fan communities. Does this no. actually help any brand to achieve its marketing objective? Is it sheer volume of fans that drives influence for any brand on facebook? Are these fans of relevant TG for this brand? How influential are these people within their own social circle?

Once you will think about these questions, whole concept of no. of fans will seem like a tip of iceberg. You’ll need to dig deeper to know more insightful information. Here we are! Suggesting a more appropriate parameter to evaluate brand’s popularity on social media.

‘People Talking About This’ (PTAT) is a metric which shows brand’s popularity based on logical, measurable & real actions on social media. PTAT utilizes following actions to calculate the numbers:

• Like a page
• Post on the page wall
• Like a post
• Comment on a post
• Share a post
• Answer a question
• RSVP to a page’s event
• Mention the page in a post
• Tag the page in a photo
• Check in at a place
• Share a check-in deal
• Like a check-in deal
• Write a recommendation

Whenever a user performs any of above actions, it’s accounted as an ‘interaction’ on facebook’s algorithm. Total volume of such interactions by unique individuals is accounted as PTAT. Let’s explore this parameter using some of most popular Indian & US facebook pages.

Here is head to head comparison between Tata DoCoMo and MTV Roadies facebook pages, which are supposedly most buzzing & probably, amongst the largest (in terms of no. of fans!) facebook pages:

India scenario:

Brands	Fans	People Talking About This	Percentage
Tata DoCoMo	9,231,953	287,565	3%
MTV Roadies	4,626,043	143,864	3%

US scenario:

Head to head comparison between Walmart and The Simpsons, which are amongst highly buzzed Facebook pages in US:

Brands	Fans	People Talking About This	Percentage
Walmart	21,883,131	2,819,083	13%
The Simpsons	54,822,111	374,616	1%

Both scenarios portray the same picture. Brands having high fan bases do not score much on percentage PTAT.

‘People Talking About This’ is far more important metric as it focuses on interactions beyond an initial Facebook Like. However, PTAT does not track clicked links, posts read or videos watched. This takes us to another level of interrogation of this parameter. Clicking on a link, video view & post read are also equally important actions. And, when a brand’s sole objective is to convey its marketing message across social platforms, above actions will result in brand’s marketing success.

So, if brand’s facebook engagement strategy is based on No. of fans or % of PTAT, then they are surely, missing the target. Then, what should brands do? Track Engaged Users!

Brands should focus on Engaged Users. Which includes PTAT, actions like clicking a post, opening a link, watching videos and viewing photos. And how do we track these actions? Well, that is a very simple yet tedious method. But, there is no magic wand that would give you delightful social media insight without putting efforts, isn’t it?

So, here is how we track Engaged Users:

On your facebook insights ‘overview’ tab, you will see details of each post in tabular format. This report highlights 4 important parameters: Reach, Engaged users, Talking about this (PTAT) & Virality. Of which, Engaged users – is what we are discussing in this post. Manually add engaged users for each post & it will show exact no of users engaged with your brand.

Two more sub-metrics that needs a mention here are:

• Virality Rate: - PTAT divided by the Reach (the number of people who have seen your Post)
• Engagement Rate: - Engagement Rate is the number of Engaged Users divided by the Reach

We will take you through details of both these metrics in our upcoming posts.

About Author:

Pankaj Sharma, has more than 5 years of social media listening and research experience with American, European and Indian brands. A Masters in Biotechnology - turned Social Media Analyst by interest follows Indian Social Media landscape very closely. Brian Solis, Jeremiah Owyang and Scott Monty are his role models. This post was first written by Pankaj, and was posted here by MeDigit after some edits.

Jabong.com - a third eye view. Some good, some strange findings

Its a lazy Sunday morning and I was just sitting at home, having a cup of tea with Sunday Times. My roomie turned the television on among all crappy Sunday morning shows, one thing noticed my attention - All new online lifestyle store: JABONG.COM! Lot of things have been written about current and future shape of e-commerce in India, and this subject being one of my favorite, I decided to do some 'khufiapanti'! While TV ad seems quite boring and uninteresting, they have managed to create a good looking product. Lot of options and filters to choose product of your choice. Messaging is simple: Free Shipping, Cash on Delivery, 30 day return policy and Free Hotline! Enough to excite an Indian online buyer. Then I decided to go more deeper and check out some other facts about site. Name 'Jabong' means a tropical fruit. Neither logo, nor anything on site relates to Jabong fruit btw! I don't even know how many Indians would be knowing about this strange name. This led me to check traffic on site, and here are some interesting facts:

• Alexa traffic rank: 119 in India (now that's impressive!)
• 1.6 Mn Unique visitors / month
• 8.2 Mn page views
• More than 6 page views / visit

Some images for better understanding of traffic on site:

Site page views:

Site traffic details from Google Ad Planner:

Visitor Demographics (Alexa): Well, everything is interesting about site traffic, isn't it? A lesser known weird name, in highly cluttered e-commerce market generates so much of traffic. I was surprised. I decided to check how much of this could be organic. I went on to check popularity of site on Google's organic search and found this:

• 'Jabong' keyword has very 'low' search volume and generates approx 8100 search queries on Google
• 'Jabong.com' is even lesser popular and generates approx 1000 queries on Google

I could not figure out exact % of organic traffic, but its clear that name 'Jabong' is not popular among people and visitors do not search for 'Jabong' on Google. So, where do they come from?

Well, here is a possible answer: Social Media!

I went on to check social presence of Jabong, and it was a sweet surprise!

• Staggering 192,138 'likes' on facebook!! However, none of those is my friend :-(
• 11232 followers on Twitter! Btw, none of these followers in my network, again!

This brand is definitely doing some wonders on social media! Its kind of silent penetration which nobody noticed till date. I also checked if Jabong has been covered by news portals. Google News search throws only 4 relevant news items, most of which including ET, Hindu Business Line and Tech Crunch covers Jabong as just another e-commerce portal. So, Where does this site get traffic from? Paid promotions?? May be.

This led me to check origin of site and and a quick whois check revealed that domain was created in 2004 and last updated on 9th feb 2012. Even traffic data shows minimal traffic before february. So, its clear that site started operating only in february. Now, if that's the case - getting 8.2mn page views within 2 months is a huge success!

I also landed on this linkedin page, clearly suggesting they launched site 2-3 months back:

Now I strongly feel that getting such numbers organically in 2 months is highly difficult... and if you get it, you must get covered by all technology blogs and news media for sure! Question is why isn't anyone talking about it?

Also, here is an interesting finding. Google search of 'jabong' results shows a negative review on mouthshut on first page of results (written just one day ago). mouthshut.com shows overall rating of 1 star, out of 4 ratings. People talk about poor service and bad experience.

So, site's quality and 'look n feel' is nice. Site traffic is impressive and growing exponentially. It has managed to get huge numbers on Social Media profiles as well! However, some facts and figures shows different picture. Also, their huge TV advertising campaign is supported by online campaign and that should be driving traffic for the moment.

It will be interesting to see how Jabong.com fares in long run. E-commerce is game of trust service and quality. Jabong.com has a long mile to catch up on these factors. While flipkart, ebay, snapdeal and infibeam of the world are enjoying leadership position, I would love to see how Jabong differentiates and establishes its connect with consumers. Surely, there is a market for everyone and its up to Jabong.com to leverage potential of it.