Can you use facebook to stimulate your fans to talk about you?

Since the Advertising Age covered the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s analysis of facebook’s ‘talking about’ metric there has been a flurry of internet coverage.

The findings got reduced to a sound bite of “only 1% of facebook fans engage with brands”. Which could easily be misinterpreted. Dr Karen Nelson-Field’s result is actually that around 0.4% (ie less than one percent) of the fans of a brand actually interact with it on facebook in a typical wek.

The interaction is what facebook report as “Talking about’, and includes activity such as to like, comment on or share a Brand Page post (or other content on a page, like photos, videos or albums), post to a Page’s Wall, answer a posted question, liking or sharing a check-in deal, RSVP to an event, mention a Page in a post, phototag a Brand Page…all the activity that facebook measure.

Now 0.4% in a week doesn’t sound so bad. It sounds like it might cumulate to near 25% in a year, but this would be a heroic assumption. In these sorts of social phenomenon we usually see highly skewed distributions. There will be a small percent of fans who do most of the talking every week. So this probably cumulates to something much less than 10% in a year. Karen is investigating.