The brands on Facebook that most people are talking about

So you are a large brand that have managed to attract a lot of followers or fans on Facebook. That’s great, but how much engagement is there around the content that your brand is posting on Facebook? That’s what Facebook’s new metric “People Talking About” is trying to measure. The metric “represents the number of people that are talking about the page, sharing content from the page and further interacting with the page, thus creating stories. Its basically a metric of active fans”.

This number can be found on Facebook pages, below the number of fans. But what is a good number? How can you determine if you are doing better than your competitors? To get a better understanding of how the most popular brands are doing in terms of engagement, I looked at the top 40 brands according to a list compiled by Ignite Social Media. There are other pages on Facebook with more fans, like sports teams, but this is a good list to look at.

National Geographic fans are active
It turns out that for most of the top consumer brands, engagement levels are somewhere between 0.5 – 2% of the total number of fans. So if you have 10 million fans, you probably have about 50,000 – 200,000 “People Talking About” your content. That’s a good benchmark to look at when you study your own page. At the top of this list is National Geographic, which is a media brand. Media pages often have even higher levels of engagement, possibly because they are very good at creating rich content on an ongoing basis. For example, the Guardian has 124,800 fans and 8,000 (or 6.4%) people talking about its page.

Among the non-media brands, Burberry, Walmart and Disney seem to do an outstanding job in getting their fans like, comment and share their content.

All the top 40 brand pages can be found in this Slideshare document, which you can also download for better viewing.

Other pages with really active fans can be found among sports teams (not on this list). Real Madrid (5.28%), Manchester United (3.21%) and FC Barcelona (2.99%) are some examples.

What I haven’t been able to determine if the value of “People Talking About” will aggregate over time or if it is a measure based on a period of time, for example the last 6 months. UPDATE: it measures the number of people that have interacted with your page during the last 7 days. Do you have any other examples of Facebook pages that many “People Are Talking About”? Please share in the comments.

Footnote: This metric does not measure how many times a brand is mentioned on Facebook.

Update: Hat tip to Markus Welin for the info about the 7 day period of measurement.