Facebook App Adoption of the Top 100 brands

July 22nd, 2010

Topics: Facebook, Perspectives, Social

Facebook App Adoption by Brand

Facebook apps are popular tools for modern marketers. They allow brands to create engaging experiences for their Facebook fans such as polls, coupons, video channels, and more. Because we talk with a lot of companies about using our Facebook Analytics to track the success of their Facebook Apps, we are often asked for benchmarks about app adoption. Brands are asking because they want to see how they stack up to other brands. So we decided to do a little research. Here’s what we found:

fb-apps-bar

With such a wide range of distribution, we felt like it was hard to get a sense of the bigger picture. So, we made a new chart that used ranges instead of the exact count, and it produced this more meaningful chart below:

fb-app-pie

Notable Facebook app adoption patterns

  • Almost half of the top 100 brands do not use apps.
  • Of those brands do use Facebook apps, most use 1-3.
  • Avon used the most apps at 9. Followed by Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton, and Samsung who all use 8 apps.

About our methodology

We started with the top 100 brands in social media as identified by the Altimeter Group. Then, we searched for their main corporate fan page and counted the number of apps and tabs they were using. It’s important to note that we only focused on the main corporate fan pages of the top 100 brands. We counted the apps on June 17th, 2010.

We are doing some additional research about the number of fan pages that brands are using and the number of apps on the other fan pages. For example, Nike focuses on its sub brands like Running and Golf rather than a main corporate fan page.

The list of the top 100 we chose was based on the research by the Altimeter Group. They focused on the top brands of social media. Eleven brands on that list did not have a Facebook fan page. We plan to create a new list that is the top 100 brands on Facebook and recalculate the app adoption numbers.

We also plan to look at the top brands in the world regardless of their social media adoption because it would be interesting to see those adoption patterns.

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  • Justin Kistner

    Hi Tyler, this includes standalone apps as well (although it is possible we wouldn’t find ones that weren’t linked from anywhere on their fan page).

    Jason, great thoughts about growth and types of apps used. We’ll add those criteria to the next round!

    • http://www.socialcubix.com/services/social-media Social Media App Developer

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  • http://www.involver.com Tyler Willis

    Is this for apps on fan pages only, or does it include standalone apps as well?

    Great research, thanks for blogging it Justin!

  • http://socialfresh.com Jason Keath

    Great data.

    My questions, is this app adoption slowing or growing? And what apps are they using?

    The history of apps on Facebook focused on built in experiences. You took IQ quizes or played games.

    Since the brand page has gotten so much love, a lot of these apps, I suspect, are utility based. Like you said, for polls, video pages, etc.

    Curious if this is what you are seeing…