With a Facebook follower base of more than 34 million fans, and growing some 2.6% each month, Coca-Cola is ranked as the top brand on Facebook among the nation's top 100 advertisers, according to the Covario Facebook Presence Index, which evaluates the competitive performance of Facebook pages.

The leading beverage brand also has strong fan engagement, typically seven posts a month that each garners more than 235 comments and nearly 1,750 "likes."
 
Coca-Cola with an overall Facebook Health Score of 100 (on a scale of 1-100) ranks slightly ahead of second-place Hyundai (98), with MTV (Viacom) (88), Disney (76) and Bayer (73) rounding out the top 5.

Below, additional findings from Covario's Social Media Study of Top 100 Advertisers.

The Facebook Presence ranking is based on a weighted model composed of each brand's reach (number/ growth of followers), engagement (monthly posts, likes, comments and applications), technical aspects Facebook page (brand name usage, linkage to a brand's website, etc.), and reputation (particularly negative, user-generated Facebook sites about a brand):

The Facebook Presence Score (FPS) is then applied, on a scale of 0 to 100 with "0" being "Poor" and "100" being "Excellent." The scores are normalized based on the underlying data used.

Key findings among the nation's top 100 advertisers: 

• Wal-Mart ranked on top for overall engagement. The nation's largest retailer 25% of the reach of Coke, but has huge engagement with its Facebook fans. Wal-Mart receives an average of 7,390 comments and 726 "likes" on every post, which far exceeds all of the other advertisers in the study.
• 19 brands had perfect Technical scores (Samsung, Sony, Nissan, L’Oreal are a few) and 60% had perfect Reputation scores (at the time of writing).
• Apple is the only company among the top 100 advertisers that does not have an official Facebook page. The top Apple listing is a user page with 188,000 followers. 

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Facebook Presence Rankings are broken out by nine major verticals.

To develop a measurement process, the study notes, Covario considered first advertisers' goals in conducting social media programs.

At a webinar conducted by Covario in September 2011, some 80 digital marketing and search professionals were polled about those goals: Driving sales (35.8%) was cited as the top priority of social media programs, followed by driving engagement (23.5%), brand awareness (22.2%), and driving friends and +1s (13.6%). 

The financing of such campaigns was also queried: 38.5% of advertisers said they have a dedicated social media budget, 33.8% said social media campaigns are supported by search or display budgets, and 21.5% said they use public relations budgets to fund social initiatives.

Complete findings are available via download from Covario.

About the data: Findings from The Social Media Study of Top 100 Advertisers are based on a proprietary research model developed by Covario. Facebook data from the top 100 spending advertisers, as reported in Advertising Age magazine, was compiled September 6-12, 2011. Survey findings are based on a poll of 80 digital advertising and search marketing professionals, via a webinar conducted by Covario on September 22, 2011.