Increasing Fan Base Could Lower Engagement Levels

With increase in the importance of social networks as an SEO SEM marketing channel, a majority of businesses are investing more time, efforts and funds in social media marketing. For most social media marketers, the main objective of social activities is to build up a large fan base. Marketers are employing various tactics like creating compelling campaigns, promising exclusive content and offering special deals in the hopes of attracting more and more fans. But while doing this, an important question arises, are brands able to maintain the engagement levels with a large fan base?

Recently Visibli, a link-sharing solutions provider, studied engagement levels on Facebook pages with 100,000 ‘likes’ or more. The results of this analysis indicate that with the increase in the number of people involved with a social brand, the engagement levels go down. Media organizations and brands with a large number of fans received less number of ‘likes’ and comments on individuals posts compared to those with a smaller fan base.

Based on this study, artists and media organizations are ahead of brands when it comes to number of comments and ‘likes’ per post. On an average, artists receive 92 likes and 17 comments per post, media organizations get around 57 ‘likes’ and 43 comments, while brands receive 54 ‘likes’ and only 9 comments per post.

Various posting strategies and tweaking the timing, wording and length of their posts can help brands increase their engagement levels. The same study also indicated that 50% ‘likes’ were received within 1 hr 20 minutes of posting, 60% in 2 hr 15 minutes, 70% in 4 hrs, 80% in 7 hrs and 95% in 22 hrs. Brands can maximize each post by giving it time to play out before posting a new update.