What is a Facebook Fan worth to a nonprofit group?
The magazine AdWeek points to a recent study by the social-media consulting firm Vitrue that pegs the value of a fan for businesses at $3.60 apiece per year.
That figure is based on the number of impressions, or mentions, that a company receives whenever it posts a new item to its Facebook group page. If it posts an average of two messages per day to its fans, it makes two impressions on each fan. In turn, the business gets additional impressions when those fans re-post or pass along those messages to their friends.
Countring those pass-along messages, if a business has 1 million fans, two posts a day equate to about $3.6-million in equivalent media impressions, Vitrue found.
“Of course, the figures don’t include perhaps the most powerful incentive for brands building fan bases: social customer-relationship management,” Adweek wrote in its report on the study. “Marketers often use their Facebook hubs to inform fans of new products, services and promotions.”
The study offers some food for thought for nonprofit leaders as they attempt to justify investing time and resources into building social networks.
Many charities that use Facebook and other social networks measure the amount of money they raise through these networks. But the idea that fans and followers can also bring what amounts to free advertising could make some groups reconsider the way they measure the return on investment for creating and building social networks.
What do you think? Does this study change the way your organization will measure its social-media investments? Do you think the $3.60 per fan figure translates to nonprofit groups? Post a comment below to share your thoughts.
2 Responses to What’s the Value of a Facebook Fan?
jimprosser - April 14, 2010 at 12:11 pm
The value is based on the flawed idea that fan pages are (or should be) sending two updates a day to fans. In reality, that’s far too often for most fan pages – borderline spammy, unless there’s something critical happening. Better metrics for measuring value are engagement level (comments and likes relative to amount of fans), conversions (driving fans from your page to your site to take some kind of action), and sharing frequency.
ryanscott - April 15, 2010 at 3:19 pm
The numbers are nonsense.They don’t apply – they are different for every company and every organization depending on far too many factors for the study to be useful.This might work for true fan pages where people are fans of an artist and they don’t mind getting their updates twice a day. But for almost any company or nonprofit, unless there’s lots of breaking news, this frequency would be insane.