According to statistics assembled by The Social Skinny, Facebook is the number-one social marketing tool for brands (83% of brands). So you would think that brands are really kicking it on Facebook, right?

Well, according to this Inc. article, only 6 percent of a brand’s Facebook fans engage with that brand’s Facebook content. That really sucks, right?

Maybe not.

What the article doesn’t say is whether 6 percent is a good or a bad number. It’s an issue that begs for more study and data.

I have 339 friends on Facebook, and if someone studied all the activity on my timeline for the past year and told me that only about 20 of those people really engage with the content I post there, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Nor would it surprise me to learn that the vast majority (I’m thinking about 80-90 percent) of what social media marketers would term “engagement” is coming from a half-dozen or so of those 20 people.

I bet if you look at your own Facebook pages, you’ll see similar patterns of interaction. In social media, as in so many other areas of life, the Pareto principle continues to hold strong.

(Hat tip to Hillary via Barbara for the heads up on the Inc. article.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2012 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Social Media.