Jake Camacho posted on 28 November 2017
For the next installment of our Asian Leaderboard rankings, we’ll be honing in on the East Asia region, with a focus on the top ranked pages for Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea.
This time around, we’ve decided to rank the pages by audience size – large pages reign supreme in our Top 10 for East Asia. Let’s take a look at the results!
Taking a look at the Brand Leaderboard results for East Asia, more familiar brands have been listed in the Top 10 (such as K-Pop bands BTS and EXO). Japanese Facebook pages “Discover Kyoto” & “Rakuten Ichiba” are ranked #2 and #3 both with impressive audience sizes.
However, “Boyaa Poker” receives the #1 spot with an audience size of 15,075,283. Despite being in second place when it comes to audience, “Discover Kyoto” gets an A for Engagement, triggering wanderlusters to interact with storybook perfect photos of the Japanese city, and surpassing both Boyaa Poker and Rakuten Ichiba combined with 240,426 engagements.
Click the country below to discover its Top 10
Japan’s Top 10 contained a mix of pages with Discover Kyoto, Rakuten Ichiba, and Facebook Japan taking the top three spots. No single industry had an overwhelming presence in the top ten, although some patterns did emerge.
Notably, two Japanese food content pages (Buzzfeed’s Tasty Japan and Tastemade Japan) made the rankings, while two Facebook-related pages – Facebook Japan and FB Navi (an unofficial page which shares resources about Facebook) – were among the top five.
Finally, travel seemed to be a recurring theme, with Discovery Kyoto and ANA Japan taking spots #1 and #10, and with Rakuten Ichiba and Facebook Japan both achieving their highest levels of engagement with travel-related posts (more on this below).
#1 – Discover Kyoto
#2 – Rakuten Ichiba
#3 – Facebook Japan
With more than 10 million fans on Facebook, Discover Kyoto’s popularity certainly says something about the Japanese people’s pride in their heritage and culture.
Their most engaging post was a link to an article about the city of Kyoto’s ‘Jidai Matsuri’ festival. Our Promoted Post Detection model detected that the post had been boosted, helping it to pull in an impressive 44,000 engagements.
As one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites by revenue, it’s no surprise to see Rakuten Ichiba, sometimes called “The Amazon of Japan”, in our Japanese top ten.
Interestingly, the page’s most engaging posts over the past month featured content from Rakuten Ichiba’s sister service, Rakutan Travel (an online travel website). The post with the most engagements, a video montage of eye-catching scenery from travel destinations around the world, received over 5000 reactions and was viewed more than half a million times.
Importantly, it also contains a trackable Bitly link in the copy which directs viewers to the Rakuten Travel website. The Bitly link was clicked more than 8,000 times.
Continuing the trend of high-performing travel content, Facebook Japan’s top three posts were all images of beautiful landscapes or travel destinations, accompanied by information about the location.
Two of these posts, including the number one post pictured above, utilized 360-degree image technology to create a more immersive user experience, especially when viewed on mobile. Brands that have not experimented with this format yet should seriously consider doing so.
The Hong Kong rankings contained a mix of pages, although pages related to celebrities and entertainment did occupy a large chunk of the top ten.
Homegrown musicians G.E.M. and Eason Chan landed at number #3 and #9 respectively, while This Group Of People (a group of Youtube comedians) and Apple Daily (a tabloid-style newspaper with a focus on celebrity gossip) both placed within the top seven. Even the Liverpool FC unofficial fan page, which claimed the number one spot overall, could arguably fall within this category.
#1 – FC Liverpool Supporters Hong Kong
#2 – Discover Hong Kong
#3 – G.E.M.
It’s a testament to the English Premier League’s global appeal that the largest Facebook page in Hong Kong is an unofficial Liverpool fan page.
The page’s most engaging post was a video of a diehard fan’s incredibly elaborate Liverpool tattoo, which drew more than 1,300 comments. This goes to show how powerful Facebook can be when it comes to building online communities.
This is the second local tourism page to appear in our rankings after Discover Kyoto claimed the number one spot for Japan. The Discover Hong Kong page appears to boost its posts rather frequently – our Promoted Post Detection model detected that seven out of its ten most engaging posts were likely promoted.
The post with the most engagements was an image collage, and received more than 55,000 engagements. It also scored an extremely strong sentiment rating of 99 (out of 100), with over 150 highly positive comments and more than 500 ‘Love’ reactions.
The G.E.M. fan page scored its most engagements over the past 28 days with a photo post which included two candid selfies of the pop star. The casual and relatable nature of the post certainly endeared it to fans – it scored a near-perfect 99 in sentiment rating, thanks in part to its impressive number of ‘Love’ reactions (over 800) and an enthusiastic fan comments section.
Many of the comments incorporated positive emojis such as hearts and smileys, which all helped to boost the post’s sentiment score.
When ranking by audience size, we have a variety of Facebook pages that have made the Top 10 in our Locowise Brand Leaderboard for Taiwan. A few are recognisable, but what has made the top 3 are brands popular specifically within the country itself.
‘Boyaa Texas Poker’ takes the largest audience size, although its engagement is not significantly high. Dating website ‘Pairs’ is ranked #2, while ‘News.ebc’ hits the #3 spot but actually achieved the highest engagement out of the three with 759,253.
#1 – Boyaa Texas Hold ‘em
#2 – Pairs
#3 – Easter News
The Boyaa Poker Tour kickstarted back in 2015. The competition pulls together professional poker teams from 5 divisions, which play against each other to be titled the BPT global champion.
Boyaa is hitting such high numbers for fans, as perhaps users must ‘Like’ the Facebook Page in order to play the gaming app. This Facebook page has an enormous amount of fans (over 15 million), yet their engagement rate is very low.
Created in Japan, the Facebook-connecting dating app Pairs has equally grown in Taiwan. For the month of October, a video that displays particular individuals who may not be a match, generated the most engagement.
The video has been uploaded to attract those who are ‘single and ready to mingle’ and, with a reaction total of 512, it seems to be working!
The Eastern Broadcasting Network is a nationwide cable TV network in Taiwan. Our Brand Leaderboard gave this Facebook page a total brand score of 87.5 – not bad at all for a news channel!
Comedy is the key factor in this post, a video sharing the idea of having ‘Lazy Special Glasses’. It generated an epic 42,426 for engagement, inclusive of over 11,000 comments.
Taking in the Top 10 for dynamic South Korea, it is no surprise that K-Pop bands and musicians are dominating the the Brand Leaderboard.
Home & Lifestyle retailer, ‘Hi-Mart’, takes the lead with an impressive number for Audience size – 7,966,718. Facebook pages of K-Pop bands EXO and BTS achieve a better brand score, with BTS in particular hitting 749,337 for engagement.
#1 – Hi-Mart
#2 – EXO
#3 – BTS
Home & Lifestyle retailer, Hi-Mart, posted a video of their new Autumn advert and the responses are high!
The brand has paired the video post with an interactive competition asking fans to leave a comment to win a prize. The post prompted 5,982 engagements. It seems featuring two young girls in the video has made fridge shopping fun again!
South Korean-Chinese boy group, EXO, kickstarted an online conversation with the announcement (in Korean & English) of their ‘mysterious’ concert.
With the group performing for just 3 days around South Korea, fans who are and aren’t able to go took to the comments section to express their thoughts, generating 1,800 comments and contributing to a total engagement of 40,946.
Our second K-Pop act is boyband BTS. These guys are basically giant social media stars! By constantly sharing their latest selfies, playlists and behind the scenes videos with their fans, they’ve accumulated an audience size of 5,432,180.
For the month of October, the post with the most engagement featured photos of the guys in traditional Korean dress, wishing their fans a ‘Happy Chuseok’ – a holiday referred to as the “Korean Thanksgiving”. The simple yet effective post drove 132,744 forms of engagement.
See where your own brand ranks by trying out the Leaderboard for yourself. For those who would like to dive deeper into their engagement numbers, including in-depth metrics for each piece of content, sign up for a free trial of Locowise today.