2015 International Conference on Smart Technologies and Management

for Computing, Communication, Controls, Energy and Materials (ICSTM),

Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, T.N., India. 6 - 8 May 2015. pp.71-75.

Digital Brand Management — A Study on the Factors Affecting Customers’

Engagement in Facebook Pages
V. Mangala Vadivu1 and Dr. M. Neelamalar2
1
PhD Research Scholar, 2Assistant Professor
Department of Media Sciences, Anna University, Chennai, India.
Email: 1mangal1105@gmail.com, 2nmalar@yahoo.com

Abstract— The continuous growth in digital technologies has
resulted in the growth of digital brand management and made
it an essential entity for a particular brand’s success. It is
evident that Social networking sites with its user base of over
two billion stands as the most powerful and influential outlet
for online branding when compared with other digital
channels. Social media marketing (SMM) is a platform where
the marketers can give a more humanizing effect (a real
person behind the brand pages) as a brand through which they
can create a personal connection with the brand audience. Due
to this unique potential, marketers tend to leverage SMM to
increase brand loyalty, recognition and to provide richer
customer experience. But there are still disagreements on the
actual engagement rates of these brand pages and how they
can be influenced by the moderator of the page by enhancing
the online image of their brands. The study aims at building a
reliable method for calculating the engagement rate of the
Facebook brand pages. Additionally the study aims to identify
the extent to which the moderators’ post influences the
engagement rate of its audience in terms of its content,
frequency and the number of fans present for a particular
brand page, by analyzing Facebook pages of predominant
brands available to Indian audience.
Keywords— Digital Brand management; Facebook
engagement rate; Online engagement; customer engagement;
Indian audience.
offline or online. Due to the high potential found in these
social networking sites, marketers have developed the
concept of social media marketing to tap this huge market.
Social Media Examiner in its recent report titled “Sixth
Annual Report on the State of Social Media Marketing”
have stated that 92% of the marketers agree that social
media marketing has gained more exposure to their business
and more than half of the marketers who have been have
been focusing on social media have recorded improvement
in their sales.
According to Statista, Facebook is currently having 1415
million active accounts, making it the first social network to
surpass one billion registered accounts. Twitter, Google+,
LinkedIn, Instagram had 228, 300, 347 and 300 million
accounts respectively [2].
The study aims to analyze the online brand pages of one of
the most dominant social networking sites – Facebook – to
analyze the factors that increase the flow of user activity
which in-turn will aid in increasing the business – customer
(B2C) relationship. It is also crucial to note that the study
was limited to a few dominant Facebook brand pages
available for Indian audience and the duration of the data
collected to analyze was limited to a year.

I. INTRODUCTION
Digital or online branding is a growing spectrum of any
business strategy at present. Online branding demands
active participation in the various online platforms –
websites, social Networking, blogs, email etc – and
understanding strategies to initiate customer interaction and
multi-platform marketing to voice out the brand’s message.
Global digital statistics of US census bureau [1], have stated
that of the 2.95 million internet users worldwide, 2.03
million are active social media users, making social media
the most powerful outlet over any other media outlet present
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Internet branding (also referred to as online branding) is a
brand management technique where the World Wide Web
(WWW) acts as a medium for positioning a brand in the
marketplace. It includes the usage of all the resources of the
web such as blogs, video marketing, social media etc to
promote a particular brand. Internet branding is slowly
becoming an essential entity in the integrated marketing
strategy for many organizations. According to Rowley,
online brand outlets have become the shop window for
many, from its prior purpose of increasing visibility and
access for the brand [3].

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2015 International Conference on Smart Technologies and Management for Computing, Communication, Controls, Energy and Materials
Marketers have started using social network sites as an
active platform for brand management to capture the huge
online presence of its customers. Brands that engage in
social media marketing tends to gain higher loyalty from its
customers [4], higher Brand Authority, decrease in
marketing expense [5], increased brand credibility and seem
to provide a richer customer experience.
Customer engagement is defined as a sequential
psychological process in which customers move through to
become loyal towards a brand [6]. In the case of online
customer engagement in social media platforms is
characterized with interactivity of customer with the brand
[7]. Facebook being the largest social networking platform
with almost 1.4 billion user profiles provides an option of
creating a dedicated fan page for any particular band,
through which the brand can interact with its fans and
customers to engage them with the brand. But brands have
started to realize that the acquiring only ‘likes’ is not
enough in the long run. If the users never return or interact
with the brand’s content, it’s not an efficient investment [8].
As a result of which, companies have started focusing more
on online customer’s engagement in their social networking
pages. Social media agencies such as socialbakers, has been
testing and developing brand engagement rates based on the
customer’s interaction with the page.
III. METHODOLOGY
A. Data Collection
The data collection for the study was done using an online
application named “Netvizz” [9]. Netvizz is a data miner
application, which allows researcher to extract and export
Facebook network data in various standard file formats for
analysis. Data from twenty official Facebook brands pages
available for Indian audience were mined and data for a
time period of a year (01/Jan /2014 to 01/Jan/2015) was
extracted for the study. The brand selection for the study
was done in a way such that almost all the prominent
industries in India got covered. The industries taken for the
study include Aviation, Automobile, FMCG, Hospitals and
Healthcare, Banking and finance, Consumer Durables and
e-retail.
B. Measure of Online Engagement
Facebook’s new EdgeRank algorithm developed in 2011
consisted of three components (affinity, weight, and time
decay (or timeliness)), each referred to as an “edge” guides
what appears in users’ news feeds. Affinity is determined by
the amount of interaction between any two given Facebook
users. Weight refers to the type of post (a share, for
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example, carries more weight than a comment). Time Decay
refers to post timeliness. Hence it is crucial for the page
moderators and brands to focus on these elements and keep
their page engaged to get a higher brand recognition and
value in the virtual world of social networking.
There four ways through which a Facebook user can
interact/ engage with a Facebook brand pages are (1) Posts
– Posting their content/views/opinion/enquires directly in
the brand pages, (2) Likes – Hitting the “Like” button of the
moderators’ post, (3) Comments – Posting their
content/views/opinion/enquires relating to the moderators’
post in the comment’s section and finally (4) Shares – by
sharing the moderators posts on to their own profile
timeline. Hence the study has included only these four ways
of engagement to analyze the overall online engagement of
users for a particular brand page.
There are still many debates on developing a concrete
formula for calculating the overall engagement for a
particular Facebook page. Facebook officially measure
“engagement rate” as the percentage of people who saw a
post that liked, shared, clicked or commented on it.
Engagement rate = #likes +#comment+#shares (1)
Post Reach
This engagement rate is available in all Facebook pages in
the “pages insight” section, but it is accessible only to the
page moderator. The formula cannot be considered as an
ideal measure of engagement as it gives the same weightage
for all factors of engagement (likes, shares and comments).
Rationally, it is not possible to equate the engagement level
of a “like” with that of a “comment” or a “share”.
According to Edgerank checker, Facebook comment is four
times more valuable than a “like” i.e., For every Like a post
gets, it received 3.1 clicks on an average and every
Comment a post receives, it results 14.678 Clicks on an
average [10]. Hence a hierarchical weightage for all the
engagement factors should be incorporated while analyzing
the overall engagement in Facebook pages. More over this
formula cannot be taken in to consideration as; the formula
doesn’t consider ‘user’s posts’ - content/ views/ opinion/
enquires posted directly in the brand pages – as a factor of
engagement. It is also important to note that all four
engagement factors are relative to the number of page fans
at the moment of posting and not absolute measures. Social
Bakers, a popular social media agency follows above
principle by calculating engagement rate relatives to a
page’s fan base
Daily engagement rate
= # likes+#comments+#share X 100 (2)
Total fans on a given day
 Digital Brand Management — A Study on the Factors Affecting Customers’ Engagement in Facebook Pages

To overcome all the above short coming and to enhance the presumed to be engaging. In the online world, though many
existing measure of engagement rate, the researcher has studies have indicated that followers/ fans add credibility
developed a new formula. Primarily the methods of and trust to the pages, no study has been done correlating
interaction – like, comment, share and post – were given a brand engagement with the strength of fan base/followers
hierarchical value. Users’ post are given the highest value - for a particular brand.
“four” for each post, since posts are considered the highest
level of user engagement where the customer themselves
initiate the engagement process with the brand page without IV. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
any influence from the page’s moderator. Shares stand next
to post with an engagement value to “three/share”. Through The data mined from the twenty brand pages were analyzed
sharing the customers not only engages themselves with the and overall engagement rate of each page was calculated.
brand but also influence their friends by sharing the brand From Fig. 1 it can be inferred that of all the brands, Nestle
message on their own profile wall. Comments becomes the had the highest number of fan with 7566216 followers and
next level of engagement with a value of “two/comment”. Prestige has the least number of followers of 138916 users.
Finally the least hierarchical value of “one” is given to post
likes. By aggregating all the four, the total engagement
value that a user/customer can offer to a particular
moderator’s post would be ‘ten’. By providing an
hierarchical value to each engagement element, the
disagreement of providing equal weightage to
like,comment, share and post can be nullified.

Secondly, in order to calculate the engagement rate

incorporating the above hierarchical value system, the
mathematical concept of weighted mean is used - mean in
which each item being averaged -is multiplied by a number
(weight) based on the item's relative importance. The result
is summed up and the total is divided by the sum of the
weights and with the number of fans for a particular brand
page. Hence the overall formula used for the study is:
Engagement rate
= (TL x 1) + (TC x 2) + (TS x 3) + (TUP x 4) (3)
10 x Total fans
Where TL= Total likes
TC = Total comments
TS = Total shares
TUP = Total user’s post
Fig. 1. Total Fans Persent in the Selected Brand Pages During
the Time of Study
The moderators’ posts acts as a crucial element in any
Facebook page, as they act as the initiator of any form of
engagement from the users. The frequency and quantity of
the moderator ‘s post vary from page to page. Figure 2
shows that brands such as Apollo, Fortis healthcare, State
bank of India (SBI), Flipkart and Yepmee had the most
number of posts, posted during the study period. Relatively
the same brands seemed to have a higher frequency rate –
Apollo (1.60), Fortis healthcare(1.64), SBI (1.64),
Flipkart(1.63) and Yepmee (1.57) – compared to the other

C. Frequency of Moderators’ Post

According to a study done by Buddy Media, pages with less
frequency of posts (less than 3 posts per day) was found
more engaging than the page with more number of posting
[11]. The present study proposes to analyze whether the
above finding applicable to the Indian audience at larger
time span.

D. Number of Fans
It is a common notation that when there are increased Fig. 2. Total Number of Moderator’s Post Posted During the
number of fans/ followers of any particular entity it is Study Period in the Corresponding Band Pages.

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2015 International Conference on Smart Technologies and Management for Computing, Communication, Controls, Energy and Materials

Table I. Overall Data and Analysis of Selected Brands

Frequency
Total no Total Moderators’ User's Total Total Total Engagement
Brand Moderators’
of fans Post post post likes comments shares Rate
post/day
Air India 211180 152 152 0.41 0 140746 6868 14660 0.093
Airasia India 765404 269 222 0.60 47 26843 2917 1874 0.005
Jet airways 1826028 469 469 1.28 0 241435 11407 14304 0.016
Ford_India 672948 634 114 0.31 520 42568 1256 1396 0.007
Toyota_India 609077 520 407 1.11 113 195540 3099 9244 0.037
Volkswagan_India 2167168 153 152 0.41 1 524687 6320 9475 0.026
Amul 1244795 108 93 0.25 15 185806 1745 31963 0.022
Nestle 7566216 169 39 0.10 128 32925 726 587 0.0004
Himalaya_herbals 166248 777 495 1.35 282 54659 4314 3691 0.045
_ India
Asian paints 783279 523 384 1.05 139 114253 3531 9703 0.019
Samsung_India 4868021 503 82 0.22 421 26137 1736 1215 0.0007
Prestige 138916 485 485 1.32 0 16726 2361 1181 0.071
Vasan_eye care 221400 225 35 0.09 190 8512 410 580 0.005
Apollo 2111099 931 586 1.60 345 137548 5731 15091 0.009
Fortis Healthcare 182404 735 599 1.64 136 72622 1218 6098 0.051
State bank of India 1385608 600 600 1.64 0 296998 24343 38345 0.033
HDFC 2318630 570 534 1.46 45 206488 5005 26572 0.012
ICIC 3533040 288 288 0.78 0 2392342 31562 116267 0.079
Flipkart 4499275 914 595 1.63 319 1460975 91488 168183 0.038
Yepmee 4609137 574 574 1.57 0 1030739 15410 7164 0.023

brands. Vasan Eye care was calculated of having the least
frequency rate of 0.09.
Fig. 3 shows the line graph obtained by integrating the
engagement rates - calculated through the formula derived
for the study - of all the brands selected for the study. The
three prominent peaks of the graph shows the three most
engaged pages – Air India, Prestige and ICICI bank. The
two trough touching the base line of the graph – Nestle and
Samsung – constitute the least engaged pages of the study.
The overall data and analysis is compiled in the below table.
From Table. 1 it can be inferred that the most engaged page,
Air India with an engagement rate of 0.093 has a rather low
frequency of moderator post (0.41) and comparatively a
very low fan base of 211180 ( i.e., 2.79% of Nestlé’s fan
base). Nestle which topped the list of having the highest fan
base found was have an engagement rate of only 0.0004
which is also the least engagement rate found in the study.
Whereas Prestige having the least fan base of 138916 was
seen to hold an engagement rate of 0.071 (almost eighteen
times greater than the engagement rate of Nestle)

Fortis Heathcare and SBI which tops the list in terms of

frequency of post (1.64), have a relatively low engagement
rate of 0.051 and 0.033 when compared with Air India.

Vasan eye care had the least frequency of 0.09 but had an
engagement rate of 0.005 which is the same as Airasia with
a frequency of 0.60 (over six times the frequency of vasan
eye care). Nestle having a frequency rate of 0.10 had the
least engagement rate of 0.0004.Hence the study done by
Buddy media(2011), becomes redundant in terms of Indian
audience engagement rate of yearly analysis, as the results
shows no proportionality in frequency of posts and
Fig. 3. Engagement Rate of All the Facebbook Brand Pages
Selected for the Study.
engagement.

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 Digital Brand Management — A Study on the Factors Affecting Customers’ Engagement in Facebook Pages
V. FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION
The study paved way to develop a balanced method to
calculate the engagement rate of Facebook pages. The
network data for the period of one year of the twenty
selected brand pages was extracted for analysis. The
analysis of network data revealed that the engagement level
of the followers/ fan does not correlate with the frequency
of moderators’ post or the quantity of the fan base. It can be
assumed that factors such as interactivity, quality of post
(based on the type of media content such as text, photo
video etc) grabs the attention of the social audience rather
than the quantity of post.
The study also showed that the brand’s initial efforts for
gaining a huge fan base becomes futile if the brand fails to
make the fans interact and engage with the page
continuously. If the lack of engagement prevailed for a
longer duration then the fans tend to form a weak affinity or
ties with the page as a result of the edge rank algorithm will
avoid posting these low affinity posts in its user’s page
which may led to disconnection of the fans from the brand
page.
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number-of-users/.
75
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