Bangalore: Facebook generates a huge portion of its revenue alone from advertisements and the payers, i.e., the companies are using the number of Facebook “page likes” by users as a proof for a particular brand’s popularity and promotion.

But a recent study by Austria’s Ehrenberg-Bass institute may turn out to be a headache for these companies as the study revealed that only one percent of the Facebook users who “likes” a particular brand’s page are actually engaging with company in any meaningful way. 

The study was conducted on Facebook’s top 200 brands based on the number of fans. It tracked the entire user activities including likes, comments, posts, post sharing’s etc related to a particular page for a period of six weeks. Researchers used Facebook’s own metric “People Talking About This”, for aiding them in tracking.

According to the researchers, “People Talking About This” was just 1.3 percent compared to the brands total fan base. They also found that with the deduction of “likes”, the simple act of clicking on a particular thing for showing interest, the brand engagement percentage drops to around 0.45. That is only a small percent of those “engaged” with the brand is actually interacting with it.

According to Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, “people need to understand what Facebook can do for a brand and what it can't do. It doesn't really differ from mass media. Facebook is great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

A separate study from Nelson also showed that a person’s tendency to buy a particular brand is not affected in any way by the fact that he is a fan of the brand in Facebook or not.