New York, NY (PRWEB) November 06, 2012

Last week, stores emptied their shelves of the most popular candy for trick-or-treaters. Today Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company, moves from the shelves to the social world to investigate how the top eight American candy brands are using social media.

Unmetric sourced data from its social benchmarking platform to understand the owned social media activity of the top candy brands on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Interestingly, the majority of American candy brands have focused their social media efforts on Facebook, with few brands having any presence at all on Twitter, YouTube or Pinterest.

Unmetrics Halloween Candy Report focuses strictly on Facebook analytics, going beyond total number of fans to investigate growth metrics, engagement and content strategy. The report reveals whats working and whats not in terms of connecting with consumers for the top sweet treats on Facebook.

Unmetric collected data from its Facebook platform from August and September 2012. In terms of raw number of fans, Reeses tops all candies, nearing ten million total fans. But theres more to fan base than popularity. Kit Kat is catching up with a head of steam, growing its fan base by a remarkable 20 percent over the last four months. In a large part, Kit Kats Fan of the Month contest during the month of September contributed to this growth.

Succeeding at social media is more complicated than fan numbers and growth. Its about identifying with your fans, posting engaging content and creating real conversations. The Unmetric Score is a unique measurement designed to give broader, sector-wide context to social media activity. Its a scientific blend of various quantitative and qualitative metrics, weighted and averaged by sector to produce a single benchmarkable score ranging from zero to100. M&Ms scores the highest among all candies, with a score of 55. Reeses isnt too far behind, with a score of 54.

But if you want to know what to get for trick-or-treaters, Kit Kat is the preferred candy among young people, with 67 percent of fans under the age of 21. This is closely followed by Sour Patch Kids, with 64 percent. By comparison, only 29 percent of Nestle Crunchs fans are under 21. That said, Nestle Crunch also boasts the most evenly distributed fan base, with the highest percentage of fans in all age groups over 30.

Unmetrics Halloween Candy Report revealed some other interesting fan demographics. For every candy measured, women accounted for the majority of fans. The most divisive is Nestle Crunch, which has over three female fans for every one male. This gender divide is nonexistent for 3 Musketeers, which has only two percent more female fans than male.

In terms of posts, Hersheys is easily the most talkative candy on Facebook, posting almost twice as often as the next closest brand. While Hersheys replied to a respectable 13 percent of fan posts, putting it in third place, it also had to deal with the highest number of negative fan posts. Nestle Crunch wins when it comes to responsiveness, replying to 24 percent of fan posts in an average of just over 4 hoursboth bests among all candies measured.

While Hersheys and Nestle Crunch do a great job of talking, both are yet to hit upon a winning formula for starting conversations. Unmetric considers each posts Likes, Comments, Shares and Impressions to determine a weighted average engagement score for each candy brand. M&Ms wins big in this category with a weighted average engagement score of 312. Reeses comes in second with 203 per post, while Sour Patch Kids comes in last with an average engagement score of 17.

Thats a lot of talk. But what is it that these candy brands are actually talking about? During the last four months, the most common type of post was a question to fans. Posts that encourage fan participation get the most people talking, while questions to fans come in second place in terms of engagement. Reeses struck gold by posting recipes, which were the most engaging posts of all for the time period measured.

Heres a breakdown of some notable metrics, gathered from August 1 to September 30, 2012:

Unmetric Score

1.