Proof: Local Facebook pages still work better then the global ones

We are seeing companies do mistakes, and do relatively big ones in social media management. One of the bigger mistakes we would consider is globalising your social media presence.

Proof points:

We have pulled numbers from our Socialbakers Analytics platform and focused on our key metric: Engagement Rate (ER, it is the average number of likes and comments to each post divided by the number of fans). Local Engagement simply works significantly better then the global one. Lets take a look at BMW and Xbox, brands that have both historical global pages, but also continously pushing their local pages, which are getting stronger and stronge:

1) Xbox: The engagement of local Xbox is almost 10× bigger. What does that mean? If we only consider the top local pages, which have in total only 2 million fans, that means only the top ones create more engagement then the entire global page itself.

2) BMW: The second example here is BMW. Their engagement is “only” 3× better on local pages then global pages.

Local markets simply need to have local engagement! There are obviously different pros and cons:

Why go local?

1. Its more relevant, talks on the Facebook page are in peoples languages, all content is created locally, in the language
2. Fans then actually talk to fans
3. Smaller pages maintain generally better engagement, as people are more related to others

Why go global?

1. One centralized page
2. Less resources needed
3. Less work with set-up and internal buy-in