So I decided to do a little comparison and went to the Lady Gaga's facebook page -- over 21 million fans. Fascinating. How can one super pop star have considerably more fans than a super dooper MEGA super pop star?
So let's have a look at why Lady Gaga has so many more fans then Justin Bieber and identify some elements you can use to increase our own facebook fanbases.
Audience
The first thing we should compare between these two pages is the target market of each artist. This will ultimately determine the limits of each fanbase. Put simply, the more of your target demographic is on facebook, the higher your potential fan numbers.
Lady Gaga
Target demographic: Women 13-35
Active facebook users: 70,222,000
Justin Bieber
Taget Demographic: Women 8-18
Active facebook users: 35,812,000
OK, so I've taken some creative license and devised my own target audiences here, and obviously all of their respective fans won't fit neatly in these two audience segments, but it should still give us accurate enough results for what we're trying to do here. I've used combined audience numbers from Australia, USA and the UK.
It's immediately obvious that Justin Bieber, with access to only half the amount of fans compared to Lady Gaga, is already behind the 8-ball. From this we can see that as a medium, facebook generally misses the mark for Justin Bieber, with very few active users aged below 13 years. Lady Gaga however has access to a far greater proportion of her target market on facebook, which explains her naturally higher number of fans.
The second thing I want to investigate is the level of engagement available on each page. Engagement is a word that gets flung around a lot in online marketing, particularly social media, but it basically means the level of access that is offered to the user through a page or profile. It's the main element that sets social media apart from traditional broadcast media.
As a crude measurement tool, I've used Likes and Comments from the last 10 status updates, and taken an average of each from the last 10 wall posts by each artist*. The numbers are as follows:
Lady Gaga
Average Likes: 32,534
Average Comments 6,065
Justin Bieber
Average Likes: 24,890
Average Comments: 2,586
On average, Lady Gaga's status updates have 31% more likes and 135% more comments than Bieber.
Why?
Yes, there's the obvious answer...Gaga has more fans than Bieber, but even when you take into proportion the difference in fan numbers, Lady Gaga still annhilates Bieber with the number of comments she receives.
After studying both of the pages I've come up with a simple theory explaining the increased fan engagement on Lady Gaga's page.
It's about the editorial content of each artist's posts. That is, what is being posted and the style in which it's presented. Gaga's content speaks directly to the fans and most of the updates feature a photo of her or a photo she's taken. She is always very thankful of her fans and the style of her updates is written to speak directly to her loyal followers. She often provides insight into her daily life that wouldn't be available through any of her other social outposts.
Bieber's updates have a far more promotional tone, almost spammy, and often ask fans to download, listen to, or watch his latest piece of content. This 'selling' approach may be his barrier to properly engaging with his fans, making it difficult for his fans to digest and thus they don't feel as compelled to write a comment back.
I'm sure this aren't the only reasons for the significant difference in comment numbers though, so if you have any theories of your own then let me know in the comments below.
Takeaway
So what can we learn from the ways of the wise Lady Gaga?
To me, it seems that the more you try and push content onto your fans, the less inclined they are to like or comment back. Which makes sense when you think about it. If your friend said "you should buy this", you can really only reply with "yes" or "no", but if they said "here's a picture of what I did today", you would be more likely to start a conversation with them, and I guess the same goes for facebook.
Chris is a specialist in Social Media Marketing at Traffika. Follow him on Twitter @chrispahor.
*In an effort to keep the numbers as comparable as possible between the two artists, if there were more than two text-only updates in a row (which are generally low engagement) I took an average across all in that sequence. This was to avoid comparing text-only updates with multimedia updates and skewing the data.
