Facebook research: international brands are big in Brazil

Judging return on investment on social media is quite difficult. What is a like actually worth? What does a like mean? Who likes what brands and what are the parameters that decides this? A recent study from HaveYouHeard using Socialbakers identified 100 of the most liked brands on Facebook in 17 different countries on five continents.

HaveYouHeard touts itself as “South Africa’s foremost word-of-mouth marketing agencies”. The company manages a number of brand pages on Facebook as well.

The research took the top 100 Facebook pages in each country and analysed its true reach based on likes, activity and total endangerment.

“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 managing director, Jason Stewart.

The study focused on brand pages as well as brand engagement in South Africa, Egypt, Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Angola, United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Denmark, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.

The research used Socialbakers and LikeAlyzer, a Facebook analysis tool, to investigate each brand’s performance as well as engagement in these countries as measured by:

• its 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).

Some conclusions drawn by the study show that a good number is international brands have a huge South American following, brand pages in Ghana have decent engagement with New Zealand and Nigeria topping the engagement chart.

Though interesting to see with regions top in various thing such as likes, performance and engagement, the study says very little about which brands are getting it right. It doesn’t look explore or explain user behaviour. Aside from a select few mentions, the study also does not show the top brands in each country.

Below are some of the insights by country listed by Stewart:

• 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 nine. This may also be because of the varying number of brands online in said countries. HaveYouHeard currently has four of its brand pages consistently rated within South Africa’s Top 10 list. The other five brands (making up the nine) change on a daily basis.
• New Zealand also has the most brands with an engagement rate above five percent, 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 five percent, 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 (1 445, Jack Daniels Ghana) and the lowest number of total likes for a country’s #1 page (288 415, Vodafone Ghana).
• There were a lot of international pages that had more likes in Brazil than any other country such as Pampers, Heineken, Mentos, Fanta, Motorola, Nestle and Firefox.