Study: The brand with the highest engagement rate on Facebook has only 14,500 fans

A recent study by Socialbakers reveals that while FMCG (Fast moving consumer goods) brand pages have the highest number of fans on Facebook, it’s the Automotive brands that have the highest rates of engagement.

Coca-Cola continues to top the FMCG category, as well as brands overall, with almost 41 million fans to date. Red Bull comes in a distant second with over 27 million fans, followed by Oreo, Skittles and Pringles.

While major brand names top the list for the most fans in the FMCG category, a very different list of brands are seeing their fans respond to their Facebook posts.

Fashion brand Viktor & Rolf with just 32,000 fans has the highest engagement rate in the FMCG category, while cat food product, Friskies tops the list for the highest daily engagement rate. Beauty brand Lancome, with its official Make-up Blog, and Vichy Middle East also feature in the lists, along with energy drink, Rhino’s Energy.

When it comes to engagement in comparison to other types of brands, the FMCG category plummets to the bottom of the chart.

The brand with the highest engagement rate overall happens to be in the automotive category, with Renault ZE coming out on top, despite the fact that within that category, BMW has the most fans – namely 9.5 million of them. On the other hand, Renault ZE is barely closing in on 15,000 fans.

The highest daily engagement rate goes to the electronic brands category, with Nintendo topping the list, following by Samsung Eesti, both of which have extremely high daily engagement rates above 25%.

So what are brands doing that’s getting a bigger response out of a smaller group of fans. When it comes to car brands, Socialbakers points to a few of the advantages that they have up their sleeves – including a huge marketing budget, access to stunning visuals, and already having a strong sense of community and brand loyalty engendered in their consumer base.

A lot of the pages with high engagement rates also appear to share a variety of content, mixing up the medium. Rhino’s Energy posts photos, videos, and polls to engage with its fans, while the Lancome Make Up Blog page is filled with tips and tricks fans can try out for themselves. Viktor & Rolf post a mixture of photos, links and videos.

If we compare that with the Coca-Cola page, the most popular brand on Facebook, it appears to be overwhelmingly dominated by photos, so a bit of variety certainly seems to go a long way.

That said, there is no hard and fast rule. Friskies seems to be keeping up its daily engagement rate by sharing a lot of cute cat videos. Anywhere else on the Web, this would no doubt be mercilessly mocked, but among cat-lovers, it is an obvious hit.

To view each category’s top 5 brands in terms of fan following, engagement and daily engagement, check out the full report.