What do Manchester United and Justin Bieber have in common?

Fans of the British soccer team and the teenage Canadian pop star are the most active and engaged on Facebook, according to a survey by FanGager, a New York-based startup that measures brand engagement on social networking sites.

Launched in the U.S. one month ago, FanGager uses Facebook and Twitter open APIs to track social activity and brand engagement. After producing a report for a brand, FanGager offers a selection of applications that allow companies to build fan activity and engagement.

“Brands have been collecting fans and followers for some time,” Eran Gefen, FanGager’s founder and CEO, told Wired.com in a recent interview. “But the real question is not how many fans you have, but how many active and engaged fans you have.”

FanGager’s service represents another step in the inevitable evolution of mining social media activity to identify a brand’s most loyal and engaged fans, and then target them. The company will be releasing its list of the top 100 brands with the most active and engaged Facebook fans on Wednesday. Wired.com was granted an advance look.

FanGager’s analysis shows that having a vast number number of fans — Bieber has over 20 million — is not what counts, especially because the overwhelming majority of Facebook fans don’t ever actually engage with the brand through social media, other than becoming a fan in the first place. The key is identifying and encouraging a core group of loyal and engaged fans, because those fans are a company’s most likely customers.

FanGager crunches data including posts, comments, and “likes” to produce an “active fans rate,” which, for most brands, hovers in the 1–2 percent range. Gefen says his company’s goal is to help brands bring that percentage up toward 10 percent.

In the survey of the top 100 brands by fan activity and engagement, which the company will be updating monthly, Man U. and Bieber took the top spots, followed by popular TV shows like Glee, The Jersey Shore and NCIS, European soccer teams like Real Madrid C.F. and FC Barcelona, and pop stars Kesha and Britney Spears.

Man U. has an active fan-rate of 2.6 percent, or 256,206 of its total Facebook fan base of 9,915,504. Bieber has an active-fan rate of 1.8 percent, or 359,116 of his 20,379,964 fans.

Measuring the absolute number of active fans, Bieber comes in first, followed by Texas Hold ‘em Poker. Glee is fourth, followed by Barack Obama and the Black Eyed Peas. MTV also makes the top 10 with 154,888 active fans.

Originally formed two years ago in Israel, where its clients include major brands like Nokia, Red Bull, American Express and the TV show Big Brother, FanGager moved its headquarters to New York City last month. The company has raised $2 million from private investors.

(Updated at 11:30 3/15 to correct that Justin Bieber is Canadian.)

Images courtesy FanGager

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