Retailers See Most Facebook Likes – But Not By Much

While it’s just become a fad in the last few years for retailers to actually start selling their wares on social media, just having a Facebook page has been a necessity of online merchants for many years more. In fact, it might be more important in retail than anywhere else.

Those are the findings of a recent Adobe study via eMarketer on interaction rates between Facebook users and pages of brands from various industries, including retail, media and entertainment groups, and tech firms. One of the most active top 20 percent in the category, retail brands had a 3.6-percent chance of some form of interaction (a like, a share, a comment). This was the highest top-20 average of any industry, barely edging out media and entertainment brand’s interaction rate of 3.5 percent. Automotive and tech companies managed to capture third with 3.4 percent.

If the best retailers outperform the cream of the crop from other industries on Facebook, retail gets the tables turned on it with a larger sample size. It seems that, on the whole, consumers tend to ignore the average retail Facebook page, which see just a 2.4-percent likelihood of a like over the course of the year. This is far behind the rate of the top-20 retail brands, and may point to a new understanding of just who social media is working for after all.

Soon, however, the rate at which consumers comment on pages at all might plummet – and to no surprise at Facebook headquarters. Tech publication The Information reported that code within the Facebook Messenger app appears to suggest that customers will soon be able to click-and-collect through chats with brands as well as pay without ever leaving the interface.

If that happens, brands might be too busy digging through private messages to complete sales to even care about what’s posted on their Facebook pages.