Facebook has become one of the most important PR tools of AEGEE. Each active member is fan of several AEGEE pages or friend with some antennae. The AEGEE-Europe page has an astonishing number of more tham 35,000 fans – and it’s growing constantly. Not bad for an organisation that has officially 13,000 members. But what about the AEGEE antennae? How many fans do they have? And even more important: how many talk about the page, how well do the antennae manage to engage their fans? The Golden Times checked them all. The result: although most antennae have a very large number of fans, most do not live up to the potential that Facebook offers them. Smaller antennae are often better in using Facebook that the big ones.
1. AEGEE-Baki is far ahead of the others
- With more than 5700 fans – checked on 16th of November 2013 – AEGEE-Baki’s Facebook page has by far the most fans.
- In order to be in the top ten, an antenna needs more than 2000 Facebook fans. This is a great resukt, considering that no antenna has 500 members or more.
- Most of the top ten are in the Southern part of Europe: three are in Italy, two in Spain, two in the Caucasus region, and one each in Greece, Malta and Hungary. Possible explanation: it might be that AEGEE members there are easier ready to become a fan on Facebook.
- With AEGEE-Budapest only one of the ten largest antennae of the network is ammong the locals with most Facebook fans. One two of these antennae have more than 100 members.
- Despite the large number of fans, most of the top ten pages don’t manage to engage their fans very much. Even AEGEE-Baki could do more.
- Small remark about the “talking about” number in the picture: Facebook gives a figure for the level of interaction and engagement with a page. This number is very volatile: if nothing is posted for a few weeks, people will not check the page and the “talking about” figure gets low very quickly. Therefore these figures are just a temporary image of today. However, it is a certain indication, because hardly any antenna will post many things in one month and then nothing for another month.
2. Pages versus personal profiles
- Facebook does not like it when organisations use personal profiles instead of fan pages. Therefore in AEGEE, most antennae use fan pages instead of personal profiles – although both concepts have their pros and cons.
- Currently 135 AEGEE locals have an own Facebook page, including three dead antennae: AEGEE-Avellino-Benevento, AEGEE-Macerata and AEGEE-Szeged.
- 44 of these 135 have also a personal name account for the local, some of them are not in use anymore, others use it quite a lot in parallel to the Facebook fan page.
- 28 locals have a personal profile account instead of a fan page. And the rest – less than 30 locals – have neither a page nor a personal profile account.
- The 40 antenna pages with most fans have each more than 1000 fans. One of them – AEGEE-Avellino-Benevento – does not exist anymore, but has 1812 fans.
3. Let’s talk about…
- Only five antenna pages have three-digit numbers for the level of engagement, except for the AEGEE-Valletta page. Yet, in nine out of ten cases the “talked about” number is higher than the number of members of the local.
- Only one of the most-talked about ten antennae, AEGEE-Praha, actually belongs to the ten bigggest antennae of the network. Smaller antennae do often use this PR tool more efficient than the big ones.
- 54 of the 123 branches with a page currently engage ten or less people. 11 of the 134 pages don’t provide data about the engagement level
4. Fans of the biggest antennae
- Two of the ten biggest antennae do not have a Facebook page, but use a personal profile page. The other eight, in alphabetical order, with the number of fans and engagement, are listed in the picture.
- In general: the number of Facebook fans of the ten biggest antennae is high, but the level of engagement is quite low, considering that all of these locals have more than 150 members.
- Out of the ten largest antennae, AEGEE-Budapest has the highest number of fans, but a rather low level of engagement. AEGEE-Praha manages currently best to make their fans visit the page.