The UK’s Top PR Agencies on Facebook

We’ve been exploring how PR consultancies can use social media to generate leads, and ultimately new business[1]. An agency’s Facebook Page represents a pool of potential prospects – but it will only work for the business if its fans are properly engaged.

We decided to look at the top PR agencies to see which are doing the best job of engaging their UK fans on Facebook. We ignored any that operate global Facebook Pages only, as their worldwide fanbases would skew the results; besides, these agencies are unlikely to be using these Pages to generate UK business.  Then we tracked the number of fans of each agency, along with (equally important) metrics about activity on the Page – the number of posts, Likes and comments. (Read more about our Methodology here[2]).

The first thing we found is not surprising: We Are Social maintains the most popular Fan Page, and is the most active in doing so. The social media experts have 18 times as many Facebook fans as any of their rivals, and post twice as much content. This activity serves the agency well – over 30 days, their Facebook fanbase grew by over 600, by almost as many fans as their closest competitor has picked up in total. Each month, We Are Social grows by a Hill & Knowlton.

Relatively speaking, other agencies are far more active. Clarion Communications’ Fan Page, called Digital PR Talk, has 0.2% of the reach of We Are Social (27 fans – not enough to make our top 25), yet has published half as many posts. Less extreme examples are Primal PR, with 404 fans and 42 posts (3% of We Are Social, and 27%, respectively), and Fishburn Hedges, with 247 fans (2%) and 41 posts (26%).

The fact that these Fan Pages are active but remain small reinforces the importance of effective fan engagement. Organic Page growth relies on existing fans interacting with posts – Liking or commenting on them. Only when they do so will the posts appear in their News Feed, thus attracting their friends to the Page. Effective engagement can be measured using the ratios of posts to Likes, and posts to comments.

Looking at these ratios, We Are Social performs less well. Its Likes/posts ratio is average (1.9) and comments/posts ratio just half of the average (0.1). These respective measures of engagement place it sixth out of all agencies, and in 14^th place. Perhaps We Are Social has broken some kind of threshold in Page size and activity, where it can’t post as much content per fan as smaller Pages, yet it posts so much content that its fans don’t interact with it all.

Four smaller Pages perform particularly well at effective engagement. Pages operated by The Big Partnership, Nelson Bostock Group, Stripe Communications and Salt appear in the top five when you look at both Likes/posts and comments/posts. The Big Partnership receives four Likes for each of its posts – the average is just 0.1 Likes per post – while each post by Salt receives 0.9 comments – the average being 0.2.

And what were PR agencies sharing that encouraged all this interaction? Content analysis of the 25 most Liked posts shows that 44% were photos and 44% links. Only three were straightforward Status Updates that didn’t contain, or link off to, richer content. The two most Liked posts, and 20% of the top 25, came from Stripe Communications – all were photos, and all but one celebrated events like award wins, and a staff birthday. We Are Social, which accounted for 28% of the most Liked posts, published links – to its new Brazilian and German operations, and to infographics and reports about social media.

Interestingly, one of We Are Social’s more popular posts was a link to this deck about brands on Facebook.[3] The report’s writers, Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey, stress Facebook as the social network where users interact with brands, and the importance of the News Feed – as the place where people spend much of their time, and interact most with brands. Given the increasing importance of Facebook to all kinds of businesses, those PR agencies that “do Facebook well” are best placed to build successful social strategies.

About us

Press Index is a leading provider of media intelligence across the key European markets. Over 50,000 media sources – print, online and broadcast – are delivered to over 5,000 corporate and PR agency clients across Europe. Our business solutions include an Analysis department, specialised in quantitative and qualitative evaluation of your media coverage.

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[1] For more, read our previous post: http://blog.pressindex.com/2011/10/what-can-we-learn-from-the-blogs-run-by-the-uk%E2%80%99s-top-pr-consultancies/

[2] Methodology:

We benchmarked the Top 150 PR Consultancies published by PR Week in May 2011. UK-only Fan Pages were retained, and the top 25 by number of fans and Likes analysed in-depth. Groups and profile Pages have not been taken into account. The data for each Fan Page was collected between 20/07 and 20/10 with the exception of the number of fans, which was extracted on 16^th October 2011.

[3] http://wearesocial.net/blog/2011/09/behaviour-brands-facebook/