You think „Fans“ on facebook, i.e. people liking your brand’s facebook page, are a useful currency for measuring success on the social web? Well, think again.
(First: the social web is more than just facebook.)
The number of fans is not a very relevant social web KPI, if they’re not active at least some of the time. Inactive fans might have shown some interest when „liking“ the facebook page. However, a large amount of inactive fans shows, that after an initial „liking“, engagement by the brand wasn’t very successful.
Hence, there is list of „top engaged facebook pages“ on facebook compiled by FanGager.
The idea: forget about the ranking of brand pages on facebook by „fans“, instead rank them by „active fans“. Nice approach, but when comparing success on facebook, I think the percentage of active fans is a much more valuable figure to measure engagement.
Popular brands will always have a larger fanbase and hence are more likely to have a larger base of active fans, too. But brands with fewer fans but a higher percentage of active fans seem to doing a much better job on facebook. (Alternatively: they are much more engaging brands to start with.)
The full list can be viewed here. Here is a screenshot of the top listed pages: