Guest post by Jason Bajamundi, currently a trainer of Cook, Train, Eat, Race, but at the time, a sales representative of FunCitySocialMedia.
What is a Facebook Fan / Twitter Follower Worth To Your Business?
Working in the social media world, being a blogger, a triathlete and somebody driven by numbers I hear and see people get all tied up in their Facebook fan numbers. There are those who don’t think anything of them and there are those that are obsessed with them.
The question that my quantitative mind has on this qualitative information is as follows:
If you have 1,000,000 likes and nobody interacts or purchases from you what difference does it make to have that many likes? If you have 1,000 likes and 1% of them spends $100 with your company aren’t you better off than the company with 1,000,000 likes and no interaction?
Obviously the answer is yes and so it means that strategic likes are more important than overall likes right?
The chances that you have 1,000,000 likes and no interaction are slim and thus it is just an example to get you thinking, and this got me thinking. It made me think about whether or not anybody has done any work to provide an ROI on social media. After doing some searches and not being satisfied with what I found I received an email with a link that summed it up for me and gave me food for thought.
That being said I am providing you the link [HERE] along with some of the pieces of the article:
Facebook Fans Worth 20 Yearly Site Visits, $136 A Piece?
Theories about the value of individual Facebook fans
What is a Facebook fan worth? It’s a question that many have attempted to answer. These answers are often greatly debated. Can you place a set value on a Facebook fan?
The latest attempt comes from Experian Hitwise. “We are constantly asked: ‘What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?’ and until now that has always been a difficult question to qualify precisely,” says the firm’s Research Director in the UK, Robin Goad. “Leveraging our unique data sets we now have an answer: for retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year.”
How much is a Facebook fan worth? Tell us what you think.
“Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month,” says Goad, plugging a new service the firm is offering, called Facebook Fan Acquisition and Analysis. “Within retail each new fan acquired will drive an additional 20 visits to a retailer’s websites, which in turn will generate extra sales both online and offline.”
“The figure of 1 fan = 20 extra visits to a website uses a unique methodology that combines Hitwise data with data from Techlightenment,” he says. “We took the top 100 retailers ranked in the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category and benchmarked visits to those websites against the number of fans those brands had on their Facebook page. We then also looked at the propensity for people to search for those retail brands after a visit to Facebook using our Search Sequence tool.”
A study (about a year ago) from Syncapse found that people who are Facebook fans, on average, spend $71.84 more per year on brands they are fans of than those who are not fans. In addition to that, they’re 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using that brand. Michael Scissons, the CEO of Syncapse, talked about the study on the Fox Business Network:
He says a Facebook fan is worth $136.38, taking into account factors like spend, loyalty, recommendations, earned media value, and cost offset for fan acquisition.
Back in February, a report released by ChompOn (which just partnered with Loopt its interesting new u-Deals offering), proclaimed that a Facebook Share was worth $14, while a Facebook “Like” was worth $8. That’s compared to a tweet being worth $5 and a Twitter follow being worth $2.
“For shares and tweets, we were able to directly attribute sales to the original action, so we simply took the total revenue attributed to each action and divided it by the total number of shares/tweets,” the firm said. “For likes and follows, we had to estimate attribution by looking at our traffic references and subtracting out purchases made through shares/tweets as well as purchases made through direct traffic.”
Zuckerberg’s point is that Facebook wants to give you the information most relevant to you. It does this by not showing you everything from all of your friends and Pages in the news feed. In terms of Facebook fans for a page, it’s worth considering that all of your messages might not find their way to all of your fans, simply because Facebook may filter some of them out of their news feeds. You can’t expect all of your fans to go to your page on their own on a regular basis.
Posts with higher engagement are more likely to appear in the News Feed:
1. Ask questions
2. Post games and trivia
3. Interact with fan engagement
4. Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
5. Incorporate relevant photos
6. Relate to current events
7. Incorporate videos
8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
9. Include links within posts
10. Be explicit in your posts
As you can see Social Media Marketing can have its payoffs but you have to also be willing to put something into it. If you think that you just slap together a Facebook fan page and a Twitter handle and business will come raining down on you let this be your warning that you are mistaken. Social Media Marketing is exactly what the name says…..social. You have to be willing to engage and interact. You must be able to address client needs and wants. You cannot ignore what is going on around you.
If you can be engaging and insightful, willing to work and put time into your marketing campaign then you can expect to see gains.
What do you think a fan is worth? Do you agree or disagree with Jason’s research?
Fred Campos is Chief of Marketing at FunCitySocialMedia.com. Like this post? Make sure you subscribe to our blog!
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Fantastic post Jason! Lots of good stuff here. I am experimenting today on my personal Facebook page by asking questions!
Thank you. You know it is interesting because it does not take a lot of work to get your fan numbers up. You engage people and they will respond. It is after all called social media for a reason….it is supposed to be social. Get people engaged and it will build from organic momentum all on its own. I have seen the results for myself on my Facebook page at CookTrainEatRace as well as on my Twitter feed at CookTrainEatRce
It takes me no time at all to put up questions, respond to comments and the following builds and I have seen the benefits of this by landing sponsorships for my triathlon racing and the inquiries from followers has grown. It takes time but like anything else you get out of it what you put into it.
Can’t wait to hear about the experiments you have going on.
It’s hard to put a fence around these numbers, but this is a very good stab at an important consideration in all marketing efforts ROI!
Jason, thank you for the great statistics but ALSO, thank you for the engagement tips. Having a fan page is not enough, a business must be engaging as well.
@funcitygal
Finally I found amazing content on your site, keep posting like this, Its very helpfull.