Don’t dabble. Take social media seriously. Nurture it. Like it. Interact with it. Facebook and Twitter are a business’s best friend if the media is understood correctly. So engage and entertain but don’t be tempted to turn social media into some sort of ad hoc advertising platform.
Talking of Qatar, the QNB bank knows a thing or two about Facebook. According to the website Social Watchlist, which monitors a string of official Facebook pages from across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), QNB is one of the top pages from Qatar. Only the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid page is higher, understandably so. And the only other bank to make the list is the Commercial Bank of Qatar, which comes in at 11. But where are the other banks?
Social Watchlist says QNB has more than 453,000 Facebook likes, as at December 2012. That’s an increase of more than 3% compared to the previous week, and an 8.71% increase on the previous four weeks. Perhaps disappointingly, the page only engaged about 5.5% of its audience. However, it had almost 24,000 people talking about the page. Now that really is good. That’s a lot of people engaging with QNB. Surely good for business.
What about the stats for the Commercial Bank of Qatar? Unfortunately, during the same period, about 2,000 people talked about its page. Its likes were up slightly compared to the previous seven days at 132,712, representing a 0.26% increase. Month on month, this was a 6.73% increase. Engagement was 1.49% of its audience.
Meanwhile, Qatar Airways, which is third on the list, enjoyed an audience engagement of slightly over 14%, even although the likes, at around 414,000, were only slightly less than QNB’s. Growth was up nearly 3% on the week and an impressive 10.27% on the month. And the number of people talking about the page? A massive 58,485. That’s a lot of people engaging with Qatar Airways. That’s a lot of opportunities to cement the brand and spread the name yet further afield.
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, the Museum of Islamic Art and the Doha Film Institute ranked fourth, fifth and sixth respectively, with likes of nearly 363,000, 327,000 and just over 200,000 representing audience engagements of 0.58%, 7.57% and 3.0%. Revealing in terms of engagement?
Out of curiosity, which MENA Facebook page comes out on top? Thaqaf Nafsak (Educate Yourself), with an incredible 4,028,908 likes. This represents a 2.70% growth from the previous week and 7.77% compared to the previous four weeks. An engagement of around 30% of its audience translated into 1,242,779 people talking about the page!
Now that’s how to use a Facebook page to engage with a target audience. Businesses everywhere should stop what they’re doing, take note and learn!
Check out Social Watchlist here.
