Evaluation of Social Network Sites: An Empirical Study of 150 Top-Ranked Firms in the World

Social networks are one of the more notable sociological phenomena of the last years. Moreover, its apparition and acceptance by majority of the citizens also suppose an important challenge for the firms. Social networks are a new and relevant channel of communication and interaction with their consumers. For this, firms have to create his own place in the social network and manage of active form the content that shares and the dialogue that is supported by their followers. In the first part of this paper we explain the creation of an index to evaluate the presence of the companies in the social network more used to international level, Facebook. The Facebook Assessment Index (FAI) is formed by several indicators grouped in three dimensions: popularity, interactivity and content. The weights for each category were obtained as recommended by a Delphi study conducted with 10 independent experts (community managers and internet marketing experts). In the second part, we applied this index to the 150 largest firms according to Fortune 2011 ranking. At present, only 44% of these firms tested had an international official Facebook page. The results showed that the larger firms are those that in general terms best manage their presence on Facebook, have the greatest number of followers and a higher degree of interactivity with them. However, the most interesting contribution of this work lies not in identifying firms that achieve higher scores on the FAI, but in comparing the pages with each other and making suggestions of ideas and practices that may improve a firm's Facebook presence as a marketing tool.