Proceedings of the 14th International Academic Conference, Malta

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ENGAGEMENT RATE ON FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE PLUS SOCIAL NETWORKS

TUDOR NICIPORUC

Abstract:

An inexperienced online marketer or a company which is new to social media marketing may just be very happy if their business page is getting many likes. This is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made when using Facebook. The world’s biggest social media platform provides countless tools for businesses to assess their perfomances; despite this, few marketers actually use them. The best way to be successful on Facebook is to focus on the engagement rate, which is calculated as the number users that have interacted with a post (whether they liked, shared, commented or clicked on the photo or link) divided by the total number of the page’s followers. Most people like a page because they saw their friends did so or because they were interested in a particular brand at a certain point in time. Consequently, even with an impressive number of likes, many business pages do not get much interaction with fans, thus their content mostly goes unnoticed. Meanwhile, when a high number of people are interacting with a brand, even if the number of followers is small, it means they are liking it, sharing its content and recommending the page to others. This means that the potential reach of that brand is much higher. So which social media platform provides the best engaged audience? Where can companies find the best quality-driven users? The purpose of this study is to answer answer these questions, by comparing the engagement rates on Facebook and Google Plus, using the social media pages of the YouSign.org petition platform. The study looks to analyze three major aspects. First of all, the post level engagement – how many likes, shares or comments a posts receives, on average. Secondly, the page level engagement, which asseses the number of people engaged as a share of the total number of followers. Third of all, we will have a look at the user’s behaviour once they have accessed the YouSign.org website, in terms of the average duration of a visit, pageviews per visit and bounce rate (the percentage of single-page visits). With the help of these indicators, we will essentially determine which social network generates more quality to the above mentioned website.

Keywords: social media marketing, social networks, Facebook, Google Plus, engagement rate

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