(November 22, 2012) CHENNAI, India — As middle class India mobilizes on a scale not seen since 1960's America, having a car is no longer a luxury of the few but an essential part of everyday life. The car market in India has come a long way since the Premier and the Ambassador, with today's discerning buyer being able to choose from a Tata Nano up to an Audi R8.

As car showrooms pop up in towns and cities across India, a new marketing frontier is opening up on Facebook to win the hearts, minds and hopefully, the loyalties of young, upwardly mobile citizens.

Today, Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company, released the most in-depth and comprehensive report on how 16 car manufacturers in India are using Facebook to leverage their marketing efforts. The report examines every aspect of the brands' Q3 social media strategy from July 1 through Sept. 30.

Key to rating the performance of the various car brands is the Unmetric Score, a unique measurement designed to give "sector aware" context to social media activity. The Car Brands in India Report highlights successes in specific metrics, while the combined Unmetric Score represents those brands with the best social media performance on Facebook. The score is a scientific blend of various qualitative and quantitative social media metrics, weighted and balanced to produce a single benchmarkable number.

Despite being a new entrant in the market compared to the other manufacturers, Audi tops the performance table with an Unmetric Score of 53. At number two is India's own Tata Motors with a 52 while another German brand, BMW, drives home in third place with a s core of 40.

In terms of raw numbers, the Indian car manufacturers come out on top. Mahindra, Maruti Suzuki and Tata have 91 lakh fans — more fans than every other car brand combined. Not surprising, perhaps, considering that these brands control over 52% of the market. It was the aspirational German brands which dominated the foreign car makers. BMW, Audi, Mercedes and VW have 39 lakh fans between them despite commanding less than 0.8% of the market share.

A demographic analysis of all the brands' pages yielded results that might be surprising to some yet unsurprising to others within the social media industry. The average fan of a car Facebook page in India is a young, single male, under the age of 21. While we know that not too many 19 year olds are driving around BMW's or even XUV's, it should come as no surprise to see these figures since over 80% of Facebook users in India are young, single and male.

As any social media agency will tell you though, fans numbers only give a small fraction of the whole social media story. How well a brand engages with an audience is far more important than fan numbers alone. Unmetric calculates engagement on a Facebook page by weighing the number of Likes, Comments, Shares and Estimated Impressions for each post.

Once again it was the premium German marques that got the most people talking. Audi blazed a trail with an average engagement score of 490. There was a surprising showing from Mitsubishi, which achieved an average engagement score of 265. This was followed up by BMW and Mercedes, who managed an average engagement score of 222 and 144 respectively.

"Young India has always had a penchant for the aspirational so I am not surprised to see the German auto manufacturers leading the way when it comes to social media performance in India," said Unmetric CEO, Lakshmanan Narayan. "With sales of just over 7,000 units in the last 12 months, we can probably count on one hand the number of 19 year olds that are able to buy their own Mercedes, so why does the brand page have nearly 6 lakh young fans?

"I think what we are seeing is the younger generation defining their own personal brand by aligning themselves with brands associated with money, wealth, success and power. It's interesting to see when compared to Facebook pages of car brands in North America because it is the everyday brands like Ford, Chevrolet and Chrysler that lead the way there on social media performance."