Top Facebook Brands - Jump on the Brand Wagon Now!

Steven Carpenter is an entrepreneur that writes the TechCrunch Teardown series that looks at the business models of consumer Internet companies. His last post looked at the top Facebook brand pages to see how successfully some brands were using social media to connect with their consumers.  We could all learn a lesson from what he found.
Sadly businesses, particularly small businesses are still not getting the most out of Facebook and Twitter, they continue to think that they can just bury their heads in the sand and believe that the social media revolution will just pass they by. They make a few half-hearted attempts to post a few words and sit back waiting for the masses to flock to them. But the larger brands know that they need to connect and engage people whilst they are not looking. They have realised the benefit in having conversations with their consumers about interests they have so that when they do want their products or services they already have a relationship with them.

*For the purpose of his research he only looked at companies with brand pages that had a fanbase of over 500,000 users in December in order to get the best measurement of this particular platform.


Top 10 Facebook Brand Pages “Like” Growth (Q1 2011)

Brand Page	Dec, 2010	Apr, 2011	Change
Coca-Cola	20,181,591	25,390,573	26%
Starbucks	18,647,055	21,016,173	13%
Oreo	15,530,714	18,370,449	18%
Disney	14,648,296	20,734,994	42%
Skittles	14,036,623	16,027,104	14%
Red Bull	13,973,519	17,555,541	26%
Converse All Star	11,729,775	16,020,477	37%
Victoria’s Secret	10,465,744	12,481,227	19%
Pringles	8,192,066	11,865,755	45%
Monster Energy	7,464,850	9,663,686	29%

Interestingly Facebook itself grew it’s users by 13.7% (from 585 million to 665 million, in terms of raw numbers of accounts) so you may expect to see the top brands seeing a multiple of this considering the nascent stage and untapped potential of commerce on Facebook. Conversely, if a brand page’s growth lags that of Facebook’s in general, it may be an early indicator of a stalled social media strategy.

He futher analysed the top 165 Facebook brand pages, and realised that many of the top brands on Facebook continue to experience strong fan growth (up to 245%) even those who had bases of multi-million fans.  Proof if ever the doubting Thomass' needed it that this marketing tool is nowhere near slowing down (in fact the opposite is true).
(See the full list here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/14/teardown-top-facebook-brand-page-growth/)

Here are Steven's Top 10 Takeaways:

1. Only 10 top brand pages grew their audience 100%+ last quarter and only three (Hollister, Sour Patch Kids, Trident Chewing Gum) saw 200% or more growth.
2. 31 brand pages (19% of the total) grew less than the overall Facebook growth rate of 14%. Starbucks, the 2nd largest brand page on Facebook, was the largest brand in the bottom 31. By contrast, Coca-Cola, Facebook’s largest brand, grew 26%, and Disney, the new No. 3 most popular brand, grew its fans by 42%.
3. Food and apparel retail are two categories of note that appear to be among the fastest growth areas. This is interesting considering consumption for these products mostly occur offline.
4. Apparel retailers, specifically, seem to be doing a better job of tying their retail store promotions to their Facebook presence. Interesting to note that Hollister and Abercrombie are No. 1 and No. 4, respectively, and are owned by the same company. American Eagle, Forever 21, H&M, and Zara are all doing something right.
5. Walmart was the No. 12 fastest-growing fan page, adding 2.5 million fans. Along with its recent acquisition of Kosmix, I believe Walmart will continue to invest heavily in social, commerce, and campaigns.
6. In the next decile, quick-serve restaurants such as Domino’s, Pizza Hut, In-N-Out Burger, and Wendy’s appear to signal another trend worth noting. The key question for these firms is how to drive restaurant visits and sales from these pages when food is, by definition, offline activity.
7. Fanning specific niche passion products (Olive Garden bread sticks, Sharpie markers, Swedish Fish, Cookie Dough) and seasonal items (Cadbury Eggs) may plateau when the initial novelty and/or the natural “audience” for those products is achieved.
8. Inter-category brand differences are evident and warrant further investigation. For example, why are Hollister, Abercrombie, and Forever 21 growing so much faster than Wet Seal (27%) and Pac Sun (42%)? And why do these same three brands have 3X-4X more fans than their competition?
9. An interesting brand story is happening right now in Dove soap. While Dove did not qualify for his initial analysis because it only had 271,000 fans in December, it’s 340% growth made it the No. 1 fastest 1-million fan brand page in my analysis.
10. As brands achieve critical mass and become more comfortable investing in their Facebook presence, they will become far more concerned with fan engagement, fan differentiation, loyalty and efficacy. The key question is: once they have an audience, what will they do with it?

That's the key question but smaller businesses do need to have a strategy in a smaller way because if these large brands are placing emphasis and importance on their popularity growth through Facebook then the rest must follow or get left behind.

To read the whole article from source please follow this link : http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/14/teardown-top-facebook-brand-page-growth/