Together with our sister agency Grappa, we have conducted a survey into the marketing effectiveness of Facebook campaigns among more than 50 retail and leisure centres across the UK. Among the findings, we established a metric that enables shopping centres and leisure schemes to determine the effectiveness of their Facebook marketing. The metric uses the square footage of the scheme to establish a median baseline for Fan numbers.

It enables any scheme to determine its optimal number of Fans based on a metric of 1 sq ft to 0.2% Fans. Therefore, a 100,000 sq feet scheme should expect to have 200 Fans.

We devised the metric by tracking the acquisition and retention levels of Fans across the Facebook sites of more than 50 retail and leisure schemes since 1 March 2011. The on-going Facebook Fifty survey includes a representative sample of large, medium and small schemes in England, Wales and Scotland including some of the country’s most well-known shopping locations, such as Westfield London, Bicester Village and The Trafford Centre as well as popular regional and community malls.

The survey provides a snapshot of the social media landscape schemes by showing which schemes are currently under-performing and over-performing against the national benchmark.

In addition to providing schemes with a measurement metric, the survey also identifies four critical success factors that drive Facebook Fan numbers and increase interaction on the Facebook pages. These are: Brand Equity; Sticky Content; Integration (of Facebook and other social media) into traditional marketing; and sustained audience Engagement. The Facebook pages of schemes that ranked highly in the survey (by out-performing the benchmark for their size) successfully made use of all, or a combination of the four factors.

Over the next few weeks, we will be profiling examples of best practice from the survey here on the blog. For fast-track insight and to find out where your scheme ranks, just drop us a note.

You can also read the profile on our survey by Tactics, the global idea magazine for marketing directors of shopping centres, by clicking here.