Social TV Fills up Facebook, Leaving Engagement and Real-Time Interactivity to Telecommunications Industry Players

Facebook (News - Alert)-branded pages revealed that TV shows stole “the most talked about entity” in October.

Though this might seem to be a trivial fact, the critical eyes of analysts claim that it is an indicator of the fruits of social TV’s relentless efforts to take hold of the social network. Real scenario data reveals that the top 20 TV shows aired in Australia had around 8.5 million fans, beating their closest rivals, the snack food industry, by over four million fans.

But this doesn’t mean TV shows had the best type of fans ever. These fans were not the most engaged or the most informed as those of other industries. TV shows’ pages had the highest number of fans, most of whom assumed a passive role, letting the most engaging fans title go to the telecommunications-branded pages.

Needless to say, the telecommunications industry got a standing ovation for achieving what, in the opinion of many, is real success. The efforts of the industry, led by individual innovations from the likes of Telstra and Vodafone (News - Alert), attracted the interest of the author of the social media agency Online Circle Australian Facebook Performance Report, Lucia Ribeiro. 



“I am impressed by the telecommunications industry, who led the way in this respect, recording an incredibly high engagement rate of 16.6 percent – up from just 2 percent in July,” he said.

Grocery retailers took the second engagement slot with a rate of 9.8 percent, followed third place by quick serve restaurants at 7.7 percent. The report, however, pointed out that the low engagement levels on pages with heavy fan bases was perfectly in order since it’s hard to regularly mobilize such a huge base of people.

The report goes deeper and gives detailed rankings of pages, splitting them into categories with subcategories like average number of fans, average fan growth, engagement rate and share of conversation.

Findings of the report are based on data captured automatically through Facebook APIs on September 17 and 26, October 1, 8 and 15, 2012. It must be noted, though, that the list of included brands should not be viewed as exclusive rather than a representative of the giants in each vertical.