Facebook's new metric "People Talking About" went live the other day and it tries to measure the engagement level of a page. The metric "represents the number of people that are talking about the page, sharing content from the page and further interacting with the page, thus creating stories. Its basically a metric of active fans" over a seven day period. Page administrators can also track on post level how much "virality" or engagement is created.
But what is a good number? How can you determine if you are doing better than your competitors? To get a better understanding of how the most popular brands are doing in terms of engagement, I looked at the top 40 brands according to a list compiled by Ignite Social Media.
It turns out that for most of the top consumer brands, engagement levels are somewhere between 0.5 - 2% of the total number of fans. So if you have 10 million fans, you probably have about 50,000 - 200,000 "People Talking About" your content. That's a good benchmark to look at when you study your own page. If your page reaches 2% or above, you are probably pushing the right buttons.
At the top of this list is National Geographic, which is a media brand. Media pages should have high levels of engagement, since they should be experts at creating engaging content on an ongoing basis. For example, UK paper the Guardian has 124,800 fans and 8,000 (or 6.4%) people talking about its page.
Among the non-media brands, Burberry, Walmart and Disney seem to do an outstanding job in getting their fans like, comment and share their content.
All the top 40 brand pages can be found in this Slideshare document, which you can also download.
Other pages with very active fans can be found among sports teams (not on this list). Football (soccer) teams such as Real Madrid (5.28%), Manchester United (3.21%) and FC Barcelona (2.99%) are some examples.
Worth noting is that this metric is updated daily, so levels vary a lot from day to day. Data for this analysis was collected on Oct 6, 2011.