20 Jun Top 50 Branded Fan Pages Ranked by Amplification

Posted at 13:46h in Facebook Marketing by

Which of the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages are best at reaching their fans’ friends through their updates? The answer to this question is critical: Are you broadcasting to your fans only, or are your fans “serving as a conduit for brand exposure to friends within their respective social networks?” as comScore put it in their new study “The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works.”

Facebook Amplification Ratio

Thanks to our friends at Expion, a social media marketing platform, we are able to analyze both the total fan impressions and the total fan responses by reviewing every public post every Top 50 page made during the month of May. From there, we used the Amplification Ratio developed by comScore, which is simply

Impressions from Friends of Fans / Impressions from Fans

Anything over 1.0 means that the brand gets more impressions from their fans’ friends than they do from their own fans.

Friends of Fans Buy Products

It’s important to reach your fans’ friends because we’ve seen many studies showing that friends of fans are much more likely to buy than the general population. The new comScore Power of Like 2 study even included this chart showing this for top retail brands.

Fans of Friends Spend More than Average

Amplification Ratio Varies Dramatically

According to comScore, the top ten corporate brands had an average Amplification Ratio of 1.05 (Range: 0.42 to 2.18) and the top 100 brands (excluding Celebrities & Entertainment) had an average Amplification Ratio of 0.84 (Range: 0.06 to 2.87).

The Top 50 Branded Facebook Pages Average 0.30 (Range: 0.00 to 1.66). Since these are the largest brand pages on Facebook, the lower numbers suggest that it may be harder for large pages to increase this ratio since their fan impressions count is so high. Intuitively, this makes sense, as we know that the percentage of active fans shrinks as pages grow.

As you can see in the attached chart, however, regardless of size, the Amplification Ratio is highly variable.

Amplification Model Facebook

While iTunes and DC Shoes are over 1 (meaning they get more than 1 impression from a friend for every impression they get from a fan), Nutella, Oreos and Skittles barely register. This means they are not getting the volume of activity (likes, comments, shares) relative to their fan impressions that would get them into their fans’ friends News Feed.

How the Top 50 Branded Fan Pages Rank in Amplification

When you look at the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages, Facebook, YouTube, Coca-Cola, Disney and MTV dominate. But the rankings are dramatically different when you sort them by their amplification ratio, or their ability to reach their fans’ friends. Suddenly, DC Shoes is number 1 and three pages don’t make the list (Ferrero Rocher, Hello Kitty and Windows Live Messenger did not make a public post in May). Here’s the complete list:

Company Posts Est. Fan Impressions Est. Friend Impressions Amplification Ratio
DC Shoes 60 84,684,672 140,594,510 1.66
BMW 17 27,380,518 34,477,240 1.26
iTunes 86 301,781,761 368,356,680 1.22
Nike Football 54 107,328,966 128,990,322 1.20
Google 15 23,297,894 18,458,148 0.79
Burberry 29 59,800,288 46,760,390 0.78
Victoria’s Secret 77 229,871,303 165,847,167 0.72
Monster Energy 67 176,990,898 101,925,316 0.58
adidas Originals 30 69,085,142 38,937,436 0.56
Subway 30 64,921,973 35,044,852 0.54
Taco Bell 27 37,322,584 19,289,211 0.52
Target 47 97,826,672 49,788,482 0.51
Disney 25 143,957,208 47,297,624 0.33
Converse 29 142,449,791 44,834,672 0.31
H&M 49 87,247,738 20,170,683 0.23
Walmart 109 277,696,492 58,783,959 0.21
Walt Disney World 40 67,299,578 14,110,338 0.21
Levi’s 57 110,249,756 22,090,826 0.20
Disney Pixar 34 61,146,737 10,571,958 0.17
Starbucks Frappuccino 34 51,568,953 8,810,417 0.17
Zara 6 12,943,211 2,144,743 0.17
Nike 20 29,536,813 4,330,738 0.15
Starburst 18 31,648,859 4,275,598 0.14
Dr. Pepper 65 123,966,617 16,476,627 0.13
Victoria’s Secret Pink 15 28,454,395 3,713,188 0.13
Google Chrome 3 5,868,646 763,076 0.13
Blackberry 50 90,209,224 11,164,256 0.12
Disneyland 45 101,329,452 11,910,744 0.12
National Geographic 87 147,081,476 15,612,212 0.11
Mozilla Firefox 33 49,228,962 4,918,590 0.10
Starbucks 26 125,732,909 12,263,868 0.10
Coca-Cola 26 175,560,936 16,857,435 0.10
Reese’s 25 37,611,752 3,173,679 0.08
McDonalds 25 79,706,848 5,814,127 0.07
Skittles 32 112,568,996 7,207,897 0.06
Lacoste 22 34,204,199 2,162,695 0.06
Facebook 2 21,571,066 1,022,485 0.05
Oreo 22 93,589,528 3,875,913 0.04
Red Bull 59 267,250,582 9,974,607 0.04
Yahoo! 149 224,372,997 8,220,271 0.04
MTV 182 1,007,480,423 34,532,323 0.03
Nutella 9 22,261,009 663,171 0.03
Playstation 45 165,446,791 4,627,123 0.03
YouTube 32 298,539,156 7,711,144 0.03
Skype 57 79,903,886 2,040,641 0.03
Xbox 118 330,732,250 4,838,394 0.01
Pringles 28 87,088,499 1,201,654 0.01

Methodology

Using Expion, we track the largest brand pages on Facebook. Expion is able to track all public posts, total fans and the activity of all active fans. Because of this, Expion is able to calculate the maximum number of impressions a page can generate, which is defined as the number of posts times the number of fans, plus the number of fan actions times the average number of friends per active fan. To normalize this, I multiplied fan impressions by 16%, which we know from Facebook is the average number of fans who see a given post. For friend impressions, I multiplied the impressions by 12%, as we know from Facebook that that is the average number of your friends who see a given post.

From there, we took all the public brand posts (meaning not geo-targeted or age gated) in May 2012 (2,117 in all, including 182 from MTV and 149 from Yahoo) and tallied these impressions. We divided friend impressions by fan impressions to calculate the Amplification Ratio. You can do the same thing for your page using Facebook Insights data.

How does your page stack up?