A company named Unmetric has been taking a close look at many of the insurance companies who have created a page on Facebook. How well is each one using this form of social media? Unmetric took a month to gather data and compare insurers.
Unmetric is a Social Media Benchmarking and Competitive Intelligence Company. In plain English, this basically means that Unmetric is a company that can gather the important data that has something to do with a particular form of social media, and then use it to compare certain things.
In this case, Unmetric has collected data that relates to the Facebook page for a particular insurance company. It can then compare that information with the data it gathered in regards to a different insurance company.
Many businesses, brands, and insurance companies do not have a specific plan or goal in place about what they want to do with their social media presence. They also don’t understand how to tell if their company is doing better than their competitors are doing. Companies like Unmetric step in, and figure this all out. Many businesses like to have defined “benchmarks” that they can set out to achieve.
Unmetric studied the Facebook statistics for 15 leading insurance companies. All of them were United States companies. The data was gathered between September 1, 2011, and September 29, 2011.
Some of the insurance companies that had their Facebook pages looked at by Unmetric were: Farmers’ Insurance, GEICO, New York Life Insurance Company, State Farm, The Harford, Allstate Insurance, American Family Insurance, MetLife, Nationwide Insurance, TIAA-CREF, and Northwestern Mutual.
On average, an insurance company had 6,000 fans add themselves to the insurers Facebook page in the month that Unmetric was studying. MetLife, however, had 35,000 fans that month. SafeAuto Insurance had the highest growth rate for fans, (at 180%).
Unmetrics also noticed that there were differences in the frequency of updates that each insurer posted to their Facebook page. MetLife, TIAA-CREF and AllState all posted twice a day (on average), on their Facebook walls. Aflac and GEICO only posted to their Facebook walls around once every four days (on average).
Farmers’ Insurance hadn’t posted anything between June 2011, and September 2011 (when Unmetrics was gathering data). Somehow, this infrequency of posting didn’t prevent the insurer from having the largest number of fans (of all the insurers compared by Unmetrics). State Farm and Allstate had the most fan posts. On average, fans of these two insurers posted something to the insurance company’s Facebook wall about seven times each day.
Image by Neeraj Kumar on Flickr