Facebook’s secret sauce is pretty simple. There are Facebook users: More than 800 million worldwide. Companies buy Facebook advertising which, on occasion, directs a subset of these users to Facebook pages. Users like these pages, start getting a stream of activity from the brand or product on their news feeds, and voila: Connection created. And that’s what makes users want to then buy a can of Coke or watch an upcoming film in the theaters. Right?

Not quite. A new study from Australia’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute indicates that just around one percent or so of those “liking” a particular brand on Facebook actually engage with it in any meaningful capacity.

The marketing think tank drew up a list of Facebook’s top 200 brands – by number of fans – and tracked all of their related activity over a period of six weeks. Assisting the researchers in this task was Facebook’s “People Talking About This” metric, a part of Facebook’s Insights analytics platform that tracks all user activity related to a given page: Likes, posts, comments, post sharing, question answering, mentioning a page in a user’s status update, et cetera.

According to the researchers, the percentage of “People Talking About This” versus the brands’ total fan base was around 1.3 percent in total – as in, a very small percentage of those “engaged” with the brand, by initially showing interest it, were actually interacting with the brand in any capacity.

Subtract Facebook “likes,” or the simple act of slicking on a particular status update or other Facebook object to “vote” an interest in it, and the brand engagement percentage drops to around 0.45 percent.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” said Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in an interview with Ad Age. “People need to understand what [Facebook] can do for a brand and what it can’t do. Facebook doesn’t really differ from mass media. It’s great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

According to Ad Age, a separate study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute indicated that a person’s proclivity to purchase a particular brand is in no way affected by whether the person is a fan of the brand on Facebook or not. Or, in other words, Facebook fans of a brand don’t suddenly become super-shoppers of that brand – in many ways, they already are. And that’s why they’re fans.