Superfans Drive Facebook Engagement

Allison Howen — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Bigger is not always better – at least when it comes to a brand’s social media following.

In fact, when it comes to Facebook, brands should focus on acquiring active “Superfans” rather than a larger quantity of fans. A recent study from Napkin Labs, which monitored fan engagement across 52 Facebook Brand Pages that each had between 200,000 and 1,000,000 fans, found that only 6 percent of the more than 31.7 million analyzed fans actually engaged with a brand’s Facebook content.

This means that increasing your fanbase does not necessarily correlate to a boost in fan engagement. For example, the study showed that brand pages with more than 900,000-1,000,000 fans had 60 percent less engagement than brand pages with 500,000-600,000 fans – which is why brands should focus on providing their Superfans with a better social media experience.

Superfans are defined as a brand's top 20 most engaged fans. The reason these fans are valuable is because the engagement of one Superfan is equal to that of 75 fans – meaning that although brands work hard to build a big fanbase, only a small fraction of those fans are active on their Timelines and influential to other social media users. This is important to note because the study found that Superfans influence how much other fans interact. For instance, the top 10 most engaged Superfans received 2.3 times more Likes and 1.8 times more comments than less active Superfans.

"Superfans are vitally important to telling a brand's story," said Riley Gibson, co-founder CEO of Napkin Labs. "These numbers show that brand marketers need to focus less on the volume of fans and more on engaging the fans that they have. Involving engaged fans in richer experiences rather than just pushing messages is one key way to keep communities active and interested."

In order to build a community of Superfans, brands should encourage their fans to engage with posts as well as avoid superficial interactions, such as posting too many promotional messages and offers. Additionally, brands should show appreciation to their Superfans by offering them special incentives or rewards.

Move Facebook Fans Beyond Likes

Michael Garrity — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:15:00 GMT

Facebook has proven itself to be a good place for brands to connect with consumers, but in many cases, these are tenuous and do little for companies after the initial connection.

That’s why Napkin Labs launched its new Fan Center tool that helps brands go beyond simply garnering Likes from users. With this new tool, companies can drive greater insights, innovation and revenue on the social network, where many of their customers are spending their time on the Internet anyway.

Fan Center is presented at the top of a brand’s Timeline profile, and in there, companies can create campaigns that capture user- or fan-generated content, allowing the business to see what its fans are saying about the company or its product(s). In addition, it helps businesses get a clearer picture of their most influential or loyal fans, as well as the most active fans on particular campaigns. This provides marketers with enriched data and analytics on the type of users that respond and contribute to their marketing, with all of the metrics collected in one place (sort of like using a focus group).

Of course, the real beauty of this solution is that it is embedded within a brand’s Facebook page, so as to increase the likelihood that users will engage with the Fan Center and give a brand useful feedback. Users are going to be far more likely to participate when they are already thinking about the company and visiting their Facebook profile.

Integrating the solution is simple, as brands just have to add Fan Center to their profiles and are then able to customize it to fit their unique branding and theme. Napkin Labs even provides questions or prompts that they can use to foster engagement with users to get their own stories, ideas or general feedback. They type of responses they receive can vary greatly, allowing users to talk specifically about how they use a brand’s product(s), or just answer more general questions not necessarily directly related to the company that are meant to start a conversation.

Best of all, the interactions can also reach an individual user’s news feed, which extends the reach of the brand and can help bring in more people who want to add to the conversation.

Napkin Labs even added a game layer that gives fans an idea of how influential they are to a brand and awards them points for their contributions, which is always a great way to encourage more engagement among users. It also helps brands better reward users for their participation by offering them special promotions or deals for their contributions.

The Fan Center Professional package starts at $550 a month, with the Premium running $1400 and Enterprise $3100 per month, though each of the latter two requires at least three months of usage and offer both six- and 12-month plans.

'Net Features : napkin labs

Superfans Drive Facebook Engagement

Move Facebook Fans Beyond Likes