Inside Facebook

You may not have a sweet tooth after Halloween last weekend, but lots of people still do for candy-makers on Facebook. In terms of Facebook pages, most of the big candy brands have vanity URLs and well over 100,000 fans. Of course, three companies make up most of the candy market: Mars, Nestle and Hershey’s. We’ll break them down that way in our coverage.

Fan Pages of Mars Brands

Overall, Mars brands have the largest candy presence on Facebook, including the single largest fan page, Skittles. Other significant pages include M&M’s, Snickers and Twix.

With 3.52 million fans, Skittles currently has the 16th largest following on Facebook overall, according to PageData, more than its closest competitor, Reese’s, which has 1.43 million fans. Skittles has a pretty comprehensive page that includes their “Holla” and “Mix the Rainbow” games. Like a majority of the brands covered here, Skittles leaves their Wall wide open for fans to post. Although this leaves their messaging a bit unfocused, it’s hard to argue with the results they’ve achieved so far.

M&M’s has three official pages. The largest, M&M Fans, has 789,000 fans, and features a wide variety of videos and other promotions from the company. The dryly-named M&M’S Brand Chocolate Candies has 296,000 fans. There’s also a much more interesting one, called M&M’S Racing with Kyle Busch, which has only 5,000 fans.

It’s not clear why M&M is splitting pages into one for “fans” and one for the “brand” instead of having a single page. Maybe they’re approaching one Page like a group? That’s a tactic we don’t recommend. Even so, both are getting good traction, with a number of recent posts on each receiving with more than 200 likes and more than 50 comments. On the “brand” page, one photo album in July about an M&M themed Six Flags has received a strong response with 971 Likes to date. We were a little surprised at the scarcity of videos on the “brand” page, though, as M&M commercials are so famous and well liked. It appears M&M Fans is instead running the majority of those.

M&M’s other page — at least that we’ve been able to find — is M&M’S Racing with Kyle Busch. Although small, it’s a good example of how brands can target Pages at specific niches within their fan base. In this case, it reaches across the aisle to another fan-base, in this case, NASCAR. This Page doesn’t reach too high or too broadly, and the interaction with the dual fan-bases is strong.

Also, the Snickers page, with 266,000 fans has a couple of notable tabs – “Translator” and “Causes”. Translator is a game that lets you translate English into “Snanklish” – we put in ‘Facebook’ and it churned out ‘Social Nutwork’. The Causes tab, for the “Feeding America” anti-hunger campaign, is also a nice touch and one that we did not see on any other candy brand’s page.

Fan Pages of Hershey’s Brands

The Hershey’s main Fan page and the Reese’s Fan page are both similarly structured (perhaps the same person runs both pages?) with Hershey’s currently at 752,000 fans and Reese’s at 1.43 million. Engagement is a bit on the low side on the Hershey’s page, and a little more lively on the Reese’s page. Recent wall posts on both have been alternating between Halloween and college football to promote its “I’m A Big Fan” video contest.

Surprisingly, Hershey’s and Reese’s are the only brands that seemed to be really engaging fans on Halloween – we had expected every brand covered here to be plastering their pages with pumpkins and ghosts, but that just wasn’t the case. The Hershey’s page also does a good job of listing their Events and has half a dozen videos (again, commercials). One nice touch on the Reese’s page is that they’ve set up a landing page in a tab called “Reese’s Home” for new users or web searchers to land on, a strategy that is underused by most Page creators. Other brands in the Hershey’s group that have notable Facebook pages include Hershey’s Kisses and the Cadbury brand — although it’s not clear which pages are for the UK company or the brand that Hershey’s operates in the US.

Fan Pages of Nestle Brands

Nestle seems to be big on promotions, contests and apps on their pages for Butterfingers, Nestle Crunch and Kit Kat. The Butterfingers page, with 387,000 fans, has a video contest and a number of promotions. Nestle Crunch, with 111,000 fans has its “Yearbook” app that let’s you build a yearbook from your grade school days, replete with era clothing.