Commentary

Why Is Facebook So Beloved?

It’s good to be Facebook. Despite its unsettling size and vast wealth, the social giant still elicits more “love” from consumers than any other brand in the world.  

That’s according to the latest “Brand Passion” report from social quantifier NetBase, for which it extracted consumer sentiment from around 265 million social posts.

What is Facebook’s secret?

First, you have to credit its ubiquitous cultural presence, which is due in no small part to its successful mobile transformation in recent years.

Second, it’s intimately associated with our deepest emotions -- serving as it does as a direct link to friends and family, as well as a megaphone for telling the world about what we most love and hate. It’s a passion pit that resonates with consumers on the purest emotional level.

“Most consumer purchases are won over by emotion -- the more passion the consumer has for the brand, the less they rely on price as the deciding factor,” Paige Leidig, chief marketing officer at NetBase, notes in the new report.

Of course, the “price” for using Facebook is a loss of privacy, and exposure to marketers on a level that George Orwell could not have envisioned. Clearly, however, any privacy concerns among consumers are outweighed by the passion they associate with the network.

Likely due to a combination of ubiquity and utility, technology brands did very well in eliciting brand passion this year. Indeed, Apple, eBay, and Amazon ranked second, third, fourth on the list. Further down, Google ranked 17, while Microsoft ranked 19. Neither Twitter nor Snapchat made the top 100.

The NetBase report is based on brand conversations across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs, forums, news and review sites between May 2015 and May 2016.

To rank brands, NetBase considers the volume of expressed emotions, along with “passion intensity” and “net sentiment," which measures the overall direction of how consumers feel about a brand’s marketing, customer service and products.

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