61% of Brits don’t want to engage with brands on Facebook – surprised?

An interesting study dropped into my inbox this morning. Being a journalist I get sent studies day in day out, but this one caught my eye for two reasons. Firstly for the fact that according to the study UK consumers (61% of them anyway) don’t want to be bugged by brands on social networks.

The second thing to catch my eye was the fact that TNS, which carried out the survey, did its homework on this one, surveying 72,000 consumers in 60 countries to look at a range of attitudes to the presence of brands on social networking sites.

According to TNS 61% of Brits (and 57% of people across the developed world as a whole) aren’t interested in engaging with brands via social media. “Misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no one reads”, TNS sighs.

So why am I surprised? Not because I am drawn in by the angle that TNS is pushing – in fact quite the opposite. I’m quite surprised that the stat means that 40% of consumers DO want to be “bothered” (as TNS puts it) on social networks. In marketing terms, I find that a pretty healthy statistic. Because you’ve got two in every five people willing to engage with brands on Facebook, Twitter or whatever, and the rest – well it’s your job to persuade them!

It does appear that we are on the back foot here in the UK though – only a fifth of the 2,093 Brits surveyed agreed that social networks are a good place to buy products, compared to a global average of 40%.

Perhaps we need to look to the Chinese for inspiration on how to get consumers interacting with brands on the likes of Facebook – according to TNS 74% of Chinese consumers comment regularly about brands online compared to only 33% of Brits.

It appears that fast-growth markets are in general far more open to brand interaction on social networks – just 33% of Columbians and 37% of Mexicans said they don’t want to be bothered by them, while 59% of people across fast-growing countries see social networks as a good place to learn about brands (compared to only 44% of consumers in developed markets).

So the survey might suggest that there is a work to be done in persuading Brits that social networks are as good a place as any to engage with brands. Regardless, brand presence is creeping ever more quickly into Facebook’s pages, as demonstrated by the launch of its Open Graph a few weeks ago (something I wrote all about earlier this week).

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