Researching most liked brands on Facebook

While no measurement and tracking tool is perfect, using a combination of them provides more realistic indications for performance when directly compared against competitors and other industry players.

It then used Socialbakers and LikeAlyzer to investigate each brand's performance in these countries as measured by:

• the LikeAlyzer score (out of 100)

• total likes
• local likes (defined as within the country)
• percentage growth in likes
• total PTAT (people talking about this)
• total engagement rate (calculated by dividing PTAT by total likes)

• local PTAT (calculated by multiplying the engagement rate by the local likes).

"We conducted this research in a bid to learn more about the consumption of Facebook by consumers in countries around the world, specifically those countries with similar profiles to South Africa, or those which have a great influence on our culture and consumption," said HaveYouHeard's joint MD, Jason Stewart.

"A critical error that brands make when it comes to Facebook is equating success with the number of likes. This is equivalent to measuring how socially popular a person is by counting the amount of people they have met in their lifetime. A more reliable indicator of social popularity would be to measure the number of people with whom that person currently has a relationship.

"Similarly, on Facebook, if the FB relationship is equated to those who comment, respond when prodded or share posts, you'd get a more meaningful picture of engagement, or a more meaningful relationship.

"Our research highlighted many interesting pieces of information which, when viewed in totality, gave us food for thought and will certainly impact how we manage Facebook profiles for our clients' brands."

Country insights

Some of the insights by country listed by Stewart include:

• South Africa has the highest average LikeAlyzer score, at 65.38. The next highest are the US (63.22), the UK (62.88), New Zealand (60.55), Brazil (60.49) and Australia (60.19). The lowest is Angola, at 38.61. He said HaveYouHeard learnt here that, while average scores provide benchmarks, any score below 85 shows poor performance. While these scores fluctuate daily based on 24-hour activity, the target score for great performance is anything above 90.

• The country with the most number of brands that have a LikeAlyzer score above 80 is New Zealand, at 13. The UK has 10, and South Africa and Denmark each have 9, this may also be because of the varying amount of brands online in said countries.

• New Zealand also has the most brands with an engagement rate above 5%, at 11. The next highest are Nigeria (10), Denmark (9), Turkey and Angola (8), and South Africa (7).

• Ghana has the highest average engagement rate, at 2.62%. This is elevated by a few outliers at 28.81%, 14.34%, and 19.89%.

• The highest engagement rate was for Showpo, an Australian online clothing store at 42.06%. Its likes growth rate is 5%, with the community size of 366,576 in total likes.

• While the US has the second-highest average LikeAlyzer score (63.22), it has the third-lowest average engagement rate (1.09%), following the UK and Tanzania. This indicates that brands are doing well in other categories, such as likes growth, posts per day, timing, length of posts, or response rate.

• Ghana had both the lowest number of total likes in its top 100 (1445, Jack Daniels Ghana) and the lowest number of total likes for a country's #1 page (288415, Vodafone Ghana).

• Many international pages had more likes in Brazil than any other country such as Pampers, Heineken, Mentos, Fanta, Motorola, Nestle and Firefox.

"We were extremely gratified when we superimposed the average Likealyzer scores HaveYouHeard achieves for its clients' brands on the LikeAlyzer Score By Country data," said Stewart.

To get a free analysis of your South African brands Facebook page, email Jason Stewart on az.oc.draehuoyevah@nosaj.