Insights into Sri Lankan Facebook pages: MNC and Social Bakers

Facebook, the social media giant, has now reached a 665+ million user base with 80 million new accounts in the first quarter of 2011. It is with no doubt that it has hit the Sri Lankan context with a 47.2% online penetration, that is a user base of 830k+ taking the country into the 75th position of the global Facebook list.

However, Sri Lanka experienced a 7% drop in the user base that is over a 64k+ users. Mark & Comm Limited (MNC), a strategic marketing, reputation and communications partnered with Social Baker, the heart for Facebook statistics and a leading Facebook App developer, to bring in insights into Facebook pages in Sri Lanka and how it is misused when it comes to brand engagement and the measures taken to tackle and change perspective.

Insights into users from Sri Lanka

If we take the global scenario, nearly 30 % of the new account registrations have been made by users in the age group of 18-24 years of age – this remains the strongest one on Facebook and at this moment represents over 210 million Facebook users overall. This is the same with Sri Lanka – 45% of total users in Sri Lanka are from the age group of 18-24 years of age.

The second biggest age group on Facebook global is from the 25-34 years age group with almost 20 million new account registrations – this age group totals 174 million Facebook accounts as of now. It’s trending the same in Sri Lanka with this age group being the second biggest age group with a 33% share.

Interestingly, Sri Lanka boasts a massive male user base – 65% when compared to the 35% that make the female user base. Founder and the Chief Executive of MNC Thanzyl Thajudeen states that Facebook is more of a masculine type when it comes to Sri Lankan Facebook pages from a branding point of view than users’ point of view– It’s highly visible that brand marketers and agencies hold massive promotional and content that is mostly masculine type but yet the female audience is just starting to pick up on Facebook in Sri Lanka with self-expressive brands on the rise.

The third biggest gain of Facebook users in the first quarter of 2011 has been in the age group of 35-44 years ; almost 11 million new registrations and 90 million Facebook accounts in total. However, Sri Lanka also experienced increasing users from this age group during the last month. More than this age group, it’s visible that the 13-17 age groups is the second biggest in Sri Lanka as it saw increasing user rates, according to the graphs presented.

Misuse: It’s not fan growth that matters, it’s engagement

Facebook has definitely hit brands and organisations in Sri Lanka to think and act on the platform. However, it seems that brand marketers and agencies have misused this strategic tool and hence have led to a promotional tool.

MNC has been watching many brand pages from Sri Lanka and concludes that the trigger given is some promotional game such as ‘Win tickets and reloads’ or ‘Like us and stand a chance to win,’ etc. As consumers move towards preference and likes apart from promotional materials being bombarded at them, these pages are being taken as a motive of increasing short term revenue and platform to carry out promotions, etc.

There is also misuse when it comes to brand engagement. Thajudeen stated that Sri Lankan Facebook pages, mainly those official pages of brands and organisations, are only concerned with increasing the fan numbers and the agency or the marketer which handles it carries out Facebook advertising to increase the user growth with triggering a promotional message that easily makes the user click the like button.

But what happens here is that it is good for short-term but you are actually not winning the lifetime value or what we call as the ‘lifetime like’ of a fan or user. With many brand marketers practicing on this basis, the whole Facebook platform when it comes to Sri Lanka is hence being perceived as another promotional platform. It’s time to change this type of usage – brand marketers will be surprised if this tool is taken as a strategic and a longer term tool.

Insights into pages in Sri Lanka

Mark & Comm, a local partner for Social Bakers, carried out an analysis using one of the best engagement monitoring and enhancement tool, SocialBakers Page Analytics, taking from 1 January to 12 April from pages in Sri Lanka, taking four into account to give out how engagement matters rather than just growing fan numbers.

MNC took four pages – Odel (the retail clothing giant), Dialog Axiata (the leading mobile network operator), Iraj (the constant hip-hop and RnB music artist) and EFM (a favourite lifestyle radio station) – to just give out how SocialBakers Analytics identifies engagement areas and why brands and organisations need to use this analytic tool which is available on subscription packages to monitor and increase engagement on Facebook.

SocialBakers Page Analytics gives detailed analysis for Facebook pages, hence it is a great tool for brand marketers and agencies. It covers many areas of the page such as a quick overview of the monitored page, detailed analysis with regard to gain of fans, detailed analysis of posting on the wall, shows how much fans engage on this page, shows mistakes the page has done while posting, list of the key influencers on page and shows how much the page responds to its fans.

Fanpage Score measures critical areas of the page such as content, fans, post quality and engagement, meaning that the higher the page score, the better the performance it is on Facebook.

If we look at Chart 3, Odel, the retail clothing giant in Sri Lanka, has a 24% engagement rate, which is of course really good as the maximum index score is 30%. Dialog Axiata, the leading MNO, engages at 14%; Iraj, the hip-hop and RnB icon, engages at 12%; and EFM, a favourite lifestyle radio station, engages at 7%. So now we can see the importance of engagement rate, which is critical to a page.

Engagement measures how well fans interact on the Facebook page. It takes into account comments and likes and calculates the number of interactions to the total number of fans. If you have a page and do not have any idea at which rate you are engaging the fans, ask these questions: Do you attract your fans? Do they interact with you? How many of them have engaged with your wall posts? This is why using SocialBakers Page Analytics give you the edge for the page.

Another interesting insight this Page Analytic tool gives is the most happening content type. This is called the Post Category in the tool that evaluates posts on the Facebook page, measuring the number of wall posts made on the page, the number of fan posts made on the page wall, the distribution of wall posts type, etc.

If we look at Chart 3, Odel and Dialog Axiata’s favourite content type is ‘status’ whereby Iraj and EFM’s favourite is ‘video’. This is natural in the offering; for example, Odel and Dialog are more message and offer-based pages, giving out updates on offers, etc., whereas Iraj and EFM, which are more entertainment-based pages, give out latest musical videos, etc.

SocialBakers Page Analytics also gives recommendations on your posting strategy and measures whether your page posts too often or too little and if posts are too long or too short. It also takes into account the situation when you post content more than once. In general, this section gives you hints and recommendations on how to post effectively in order to reach the maximum amount of your fans. The maximum index score is 25%.

It also gives insights to post quality where it measures the quality of content published on your page. The index checks whether the page posts different content, if it posts regularly, etc. It measures this index for the past 30 days and the maximum index score is 30%. Further to all this, it also finds out which fans influence and engage with your page on a constant basis – this is great as you could reward and influence them to influence the rest and increase engagement!

SocialBakers Page

Analytics is key

SocialBakers Page Analytics is a key tool to be used by brand marketers and agencies to keep up the engagement and enhance growth and dialogue. It gives brand pages real-time information about fan engagement or quality of the postings on the Facebook page and finds out which content generates the biggest buzz, thereby improving communication on Facebook.

One of the best reason as to why it is key is that it allows you to compare different Facebook pages, even the ones that you don’t own on Facebook – this gives a detailed analysis of how your friends or competitors are using their page. As it’s tiring to keep track of with your Facebook page, SocialBakers Page Analytics tool makes it easier – it save tonnes of your time and ensures no more manual comparing of Facebook Pages by providing all in well-arranged statistics and graphs.

This tool comes with subscription packages namely SINGLE (analytics of one Facebook page costing $ 50 a month), BASIC (analytics of three Facebook pages costing $ 100 a month), MULTI7 (analytics of seven Facebook pages costing $ 100 a month), MULTI20 (analytics of 20 Facebook pages costing $ 100 a month) and the ultra package MULTI100 (analytics of 100 Facebook pages costing $ 1,000 a month). What’s more awesome about this is that it also comes with a 14 day trial period and takes less than two minutes to sign up.

From there on, it’s simple – add the Facebook pages which you want to monitor; to do so, click Monitor new page and add any Facebook page by inserting its URL into the system (for example, www.facebook.com/socialbakers). Select the appropriate time zone and click add page. Once you have added the pages, you are then taken to the Leaderboard where you find all the monitoring analysis – you could even compare to those with your industry players or competitors to gather and gain competitor analysis.

Conclusion

It’s very critical to remember that it is not the fan growth that matters, which is the case with most of the Sri Lankan brand pages – it’s the engagement and dialogue that matters; along with knowing which posts matter the most and who the key influential people are, who constantly engage with your page.

Engagement is key when it comes to Facebook and SocialBakers Page Analytics makes it possible. Mark & Comm Limited has partnered with SocialBakers to bring in this insight and the benefits of using this tool to change the misused landscape that is from a promotional to an engaging longer-term perspective. Mark & Comm also goes beyond to give advice on using this analytical tool to boost page engagement.

(This report is published by Mark & Comm Limited (MNC), a local partner for SocialBakers.