Fans are vanity. Engagement is sanity.

You may have noticed that in recent weeks we’ve been working a lot harder at our presence on Facebook. It makes sense to be on a platform where people feel at home and offer them the option of daily updates to their wall rather than a bunch of posts emailed to them each week.

With 800 million active users on Facebook, we are all increasingly accustomed to “liking” brands and commenting on status updates whenever we login to our favourite social network. Facebook is now the second most visited website after Google in many countries. At Musicademy we’re finding that people would increasingly prefer to comment on our Facebook page status updates rather than come over to the blog and comment there. That’s fine – we’ll continue to post on both platforms and we’ll continue with some Facebook only activity such as the questions, fill in the gaps updates, polls and live online events that we’ve been using recently.

There’s an old adage in business that “Turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity”. In terms of websites, blogs and Facebook pages that saying becomes “Likes are vanity. Engagement is sanity”. How many brands, celebrities and organisations have you “liked” on Facebook in the last year? How many of their pages do you ever actually visit now? Research from Pagelever.com suggests that less than 10% of fans ever see brand updates to their wall. And the Facebook “Edgerank algorithm” means that you are only really likely to see brand page updates if you have recently interacted with the page (i.e. by liking a status update, sharing it or making a comment).

This “engagement” is the holy grail for brands online and I’m pleased to say that the research I carried out this week shows that Musicademy is one of the most engaged brands in the online worship community. Facebook’s new “Talking About This” counter in the left hand side of fan pages is an important new metric – far more valuable than the number above it showing total fan numbers. Its easy to get people to join your community – that just takes a (sometimes incentivised) click. Far harder to get them to continue to like and talk to you.

Facebook Page Engagement Analysis
Brand	Number of fans	Fan numbers engaging	Percentage Engagement
Musicademy	1782	100	5.6%
Worship Backing Band	82	6	7.3%
Worship Central	2480	59	2.4%
Worship Together	21974	215	1.0%
Integrity	9490	206	2.2%
Lifeway	1399	22	1.6%
Paul Baloche	41601	361	0.9%
Kingsway	1233	7	0.6%
Hillsong Church	62184	1771	2.8%
Vicky Beeching	3513	36	1.0%
Chris Tomlin	1342917	14959	1.1%
Tim Hughes	19545	177	0.9%
Matt Redman	84594	727	0.9%
Jesus Culture	485614	7790	1.6%

As I write this our latest little Facebook question “In-ear monitoring. Yes or No?” has rocketed up the likes, comments and fan numbers. And its been so good to hear the range of opinions and experiences out there. Clearly you are more comfortable with a brief comment on Facebook than the perhaps more daunting comment on a blog post.

So thank you everyone for “engaging” with us (talking to us, commenting, liking and sharing). We really appreciate it. If you’d like to join us on Facebook just click through and click “like”. And the more you like and comment on the individual posts, the more likely that they show up on your wall. I know that our Facebook “fan” count is a lot lower than the numbers that access the website and newsletter each week and its good to have you on whatever platform. Do let us know what else we can do in this online space to serve you.