Audi Has the Most Engaged Fans on Facebook

From Mashable:

A new study shows that Audi has the most engaged fans on Facebook, even besting the likes of pop stars Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, among others. In addition, most status updates by brands get 50% of their “Likes” within the first hour and 20 minutes of being published.

Visibli analyzed more than 200 million Facebook users in February and March and tracked their engagement across various Fan Pages. Looking at the data, Audi was found to have the most-engaged fans out there — at least among pages with more than 100,000 “Likes.” For each status update, the automaker got more than 225 “Likes” per 100,000 fans, which bested even Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.

It’s not clear why Audi’s Page scored so high although the brand is currently Like-gating a video and may have Like-gated other media to increase such engagement. Saif Ajani, CEO and co-founder of Visibli, says he doesn’t know why Audi came off so well. “We’re trying to find out ourselves,” he says. An Audi rep says he hasn’t seen the study and is declining comment for the moment. The only other brand on the list was American Airlines. (See chart below.)

The study also revealed that, for brands and media companies, more fans leads to less overall engagement, but for artists, the opposite is true. On average, artists get 92 “Likes” per post, which is almost twice what brands and media companies get. On the other hand, media organizations get more comments per post (43 is the average) than artists (17) or brands (9). Ajani speculates that fans of artists might be more likely to have friends who are into similar music. “If you like John Legend and I see that, I might jump on [to the conversation] as well,” Ajani says. “If you like a CNN article, I might be less inclined.”

Finally, the study found shelf-life of a status update seems to be about a day. Within the first seven hours, a Facebook post gets about 80% of all the “Likes” it’s going to get. By 22 hours, it’s gotten 95% of all its “Likes.” That, at least, is better than the lifespan of a tweet. According to a recent study by Sysomos, 96.9% of replies to a tweet happen in the first hour.

Visibili’s report comes after Buddy Media recently looked at best practices in Facebook staus updates and discovered that posts on Thursdays and Fridays performed best, and posts of 80 characters or less got 27% more engagement than those that were more than 80 characters.