At the moment, there is much discussion going on about the actual ROI of a social media presence. Many businesses going social are not sure how to measure their social media efforts and this makes them question how much to invest online.

However, making some research on the subject, we found that the Danish company named Digital Works has recently published a great article about the actual value of a Facebook fan in their newsletter. They have gathered some interesting cases where several companies have decided to examine and analyse the value of a Facebook fan.

I’m sure that this is great knowledge for many businesses engaged in an online presence, and that it’s something which might make the end of doubting that social media has a great impact on today’s brands.

Further, I think we can all agree on the fact that it’s a lot easier to relate to exact numbers and results, so here I will go through the studies presented by Digital Works together with including some more information from the research.

The monetary value of $3.60
According to social media specialist Vitrue, a Facebook fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.60 million in equivalent media over a year. This result is made on the basis of impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, where your see the recent updates from your friends and pages you fan.

Vitrue analysed Facebook data from its clients with a combined 41 million fans, and they found that the majority of fans yielded an extra impression. This means that a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the feed on Facebook.

Further, Vitrue reached the conclusion of the exact amount of $3.6 by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. As they use as an example, this equals that Starbuck’s 6.5 million fan base is worth $23.4 million in media annually.

> Click here to read more about the research made by Vitrue

The monetary value of $136.38
Another suggestion to determining the value of a Facebook fan is made by Syncapse, a Social Media Management & Technology Partner. This company has created a paper about the subject, where they primarily have studied the variables below to reach a solution. And I think these are some very essential points to take into account in order to understand a pattern of behaviour of Facebook brand fans:

• Product spending
• Loyalty
• Propensity to recommend
• Brand affinity
• Media value
• Acquisition cost

Naturally, this also means that they have made use of fans of some of the big brands on the social network in order to create the most accurate picture of what a fan is actually worth. From examining how much money fans and non-fans respectively spend on a given brand, Syncapse has found that the monetary value of a Facebook fan is placed at $136.38.

What is also interesting to emphasize from the paper, is the following key findings:

• On average, fans spend an additional $71.84 on products they are fans of compared to non-fans.
• Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand.
• Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends.

> Click here to go to the paper made by Syncapse

1 fan = 20 visits on website
… This is the conclusion made by Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service. For retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook should be worth 20 additional visits to your website over a year.

How Hitwise reached the conclusion of the fact that 1 fan = 20 extra visits was based on their data combined with data from social media experts Techlightenment. They 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. However, you can read more about this right below.

> Click here to read more about the research made by Hitwise

What to keep in mind
What is important to remember from the above mentioned research, is the fact that we are all different. Not least is fan value one factor to your brand and another factor to others, but a fan base is also unique. Individuals have different online patterns of behaviour.

With this in mind, it’s therefore crucial to consider what you are striving for. Define a plan for your social media presence, and know what you want to obtain. You have to know what system of measurement you should count on to maintain a continuous overview of your presence. In this way, you’ll also be able to create an overview of what is working for your brand and what makes your fans engage with you.

Keep in mind as well, though, a social media channel is only going to be a success if you interact with people. Don’t expect people to “like” you and recommend your brand to others without making an actual effort. And what can also have an impact, is which time and day you post during a week. Figure out what has the greatest effect in exactly your business, since this plays a great role when reaching out to a fan base.

> Click here to read more about how to post effectively on Facebook

… And please, let us know what you think about these results 🙂

You won’t believe the hidden message in this blog post! Or rather – there isn’t one, I just wanted you to click through and read this. But bear with me – I’m about to suggest something incredibly controversial – a never-heard-before admission by a social agency!*

As much as clickbait is the emotional catnip of our online experience and can drive consistent traffic for publishers like The Daily Mail and Huff Post who churn out multiple stories each day, it’s still hugely annoying to discover you’ve been duped by an over-excited headline promising to give you all the feels. For brands, adopting the same practice can negatively affect perception and ultimately – sales. So how can brands cut through all the sensational copy and deliver successful results without falling prey to creating clickbait themselves? How do they beat them rather than join them?

Platform crackdown

In the early days of social, Facebook optimised content based on engagement, meaning that if users clicked on a piece of content, it received a higher ranking in newsfeeds. In 2014 Facebook took steps to try and crack down on those gaming this ranking using clickbait, and in February this year it introduced an update based not just on what users engaged with in their feed, but what they wanted to see. Facebook’s advice is that “Pages should avoid encouraging people to take action (such as encouraging lots of clicks), because this will likely only cause temporary spikes in metrics that might then be rebalanced by feed’s ranking over time” – meaning the latest ranking favours content that users naturally engage with rather than content that users click on through coercion.

Last month Instagram followed suit and announced it would alter user’s feeds to optimise the content users “care about the most”, and Twitter has also adopted a similar change (although users can opt-out and revert back to the chronological feed). The changes will hopefully make it harder for clickbaiters to game feeds with meaningless content, but the real aim for the platforms hosting is to surface more engaging content more frequently so users return often and stay longer.

The same goes for brands on social. If the content they produce is consistently engaging, then users will interact more frequently, leading others to discover it through preferred ranking. Ultimately, these new newsfeed algorithms exist to generate more meaningful engagement, driving not just clicks, but conversations via comments, and shares.

Learn and adapt

Meaningful engagement begins with relevant content that creates value for the user and the brand. While an insight-driven content strategy is key to delivering this, brands should also adapt stories and messages based on the emotional needs and behavior of their audience. This is more than just a case of ‘test and learn’ or refining what has already been done. Brands must also evolve their approach in line with new behaviors, platforms, competitors and rankings or risk being left behind by those who do.

A good example of a brand that does this well is Buzzfeed, who’s CEO recently shared their new strategic thinking, revealing how their objective has changed from getting users to click through to their main site to view stories, to allowing content to be consumed directly on other platforms. The new direction was prompted by analysing which content generated clicks and discovering that users prefer to consume some types of content within the platform they are already on. The company also found a discernable difference between user interactions with the same content on different platforms, demonstrating how content demand and consumption vary across sites. What spreads like wildfire on Facebook might fail miserably elsewhere.

Relevance is key

For brands looking to use social content to drive click-through to their site, it’s important to balance the goal of the company (clicks to eyeballs, or conversions to sales, for example) with the desire and behavior of users on different sites, and monitor response over time. Relevance is key to interaction, and brands that think like publishers will know that relevance is an ever-changing chameleon. While users are bombarded with meaningless clickbait, there is ample opportunity for brands to channel the social zeitgeist by delivering valuable content that meets audience needs in the format, time and platform that suits them. If they get this right, they won’t need clickbait.

At Mindjumpers we help companies and brands to think as publishers and provide end-to-end social media management across multiple markets, encompassing full social strategy, planned and reactive content creation, analysis and reporting.

If you’d like to find out more please get in touch.

*Don’t be naughty and scroll to the last paragraph – I’ve hidden the controversial part somewhere to optimize your dwell time in finding it!