Facebook: The Largest Social Network for Hispanics, the Most Untapped for USH Brands

By Lance Rios – Founder of BeingLatino.com

You gotta give it to Zuckerberg, despite all of the controversy, skepticism and challenges Facebook has gone through over the years, it remains the number 1 social networking destination in the world. While I do feel that Facebook has entirely changed the ways people socially communicate, it still has a ton of growth to go. With that said, Facebook is currently the number 1 destination for US Hispanics and I don’t see that changing any time soon… and neither are USH brands.

Allfacebook.com recently released the article, “How Facebook is embracing the U.S. Hispanic Market.” Listed below are some pretty astounding takeaways:

    Facebook has 23 million US Hispanics logging on every month
    US Hispanics are uploading more than 338 million photos every 30 days
    US Hispanics account for 1.1 billion comments and 5.83 billion likes monthly

Additionally, Fox News Latino broke down some further statistics that further clarify how engaged US Hispanics are in social media.

    USH adults are 25% more likely to follow a brand than the average US adult
    80% of US Hispanics actively engage social media vs. 70% of white non-Hispanics

From 2012 – 2014 USH brands have realized that they need to have a presence on Facebook. We’ve seen many brands open up their “Brand X Español” and/or “Brand X Latino”, and we’ve also seen that they are spending mucho dinero on aggressively growing those communities. Yet despite having these newly huge communities of fans/likes, brands haven’t even scratched the surface of Facebook’s potential.

Why haven’t brands begun to scratch that surface? I feel that many brands who have aggressively pursued the opportunity to grow their fan pages often times get locked into that one vanity metric of success being more fans/likes = better Facebook presence. While I do feel that having a substantial USH fan base is important, the success shouldn’t be primarily measured by the amount of fans acquired. What’s the point of having a Facebook page that has 1,000,000 fans/likes but only reaches 50,000 people a day?  The most important number that should be the sole base of your page’s success is the “talking about this” number, detailed in the screenshot below.

The “talking about this” number is generated off of total likes, comments and shares your page receives daily. This number represents daily estimated uniques seeing your brand’s Facebook content.

Currently, there are many studies, such as this one from edgerankchecker.com, that have been conducted to see how many people fan pages are reaching on average daily. The general range based off of these studies, is that your fan page will reach about 10-15% of your total audience organically a day. That seems a little low, right? It is… but that doesn’t mean that those percentages have to apply to your brand’s Facebook page. As seen above, Being Latino is reaching about 400% of our audience base daily. The reason being, we have studied Facebook’s ongoing algorithm shifts and have constantly remolded our strategy to work with the shifts, while still making sense for our audience. Because of that, we’ve developed an extremely strategic content calendar that allows us to defy those averages. Our fan page reaches an audience equivalent to a fan page that should have about 10,000,000 fans… except we’re doing it with less than 300K fans.

As a further point of reference, the screenshot below details a list of ten top USH non-branded community fan pages. You will see that some of these pages, such as WorldStarMexico and Latino Pride are also engaging 100%-200% of their total audience bases daily where other pages are only tapping into less than 1% of their audiences.