Along with the recent barrage of news related to the $50bn valuation of Facebook, we here at Whitevector started to once again ponder about the value of Facebook Fans, or ‘page likers’ as they should probably be referred to nowadays.
In other words, how much are friends worth to businesses in terms of the size and content of one’s Facebook Page?
We would like to note three different measures, or viewpoints, that can be useful for determining the value of brands’ Facebook Pages:
1) The amount of subscribers
One of the most commonly used variables for determining the value of brand-pages on Facebook is simply the amount of one’s audience. While this is a good measure as such, we feel that this alone might be slightly limited.
Surely, the audience size translates to amounts of impressions and reactions when brands share content on Facebook, and the ROI of Facebook activities can, to some extent, be measured from this figure. All we are saying, that perhaps a wider scope of determining audience value on Facebook could be useful.
As a side note on the measuring systems available so far, for Finland’s part there is recent data on the amount of Finnish users on Facebook (approximately 1.8mil so far), and also a site of Facebook Page audience rankings called Fanilista. By understanding the national penetration of Facebook, and seeing your brand in rankings such as Fanilista (Whitevector is #641 with our nearly 400 subscribers, Nokia being #1 with 2,5mil. ‘fans’ worldwide), you should get some idea of the value of your Facebook Page. However, we think there’s more to know in order to understand the value of each subscriber.
2) The content of each Facebook Page
One extremely important thing to remember when determining the value of Facebook Page subscribers is the quality and quantity of content your Page audience will be exposed to. If a brand is very quiet on their page, or the quality of posts does not exceed the occasional ‘good morning!’-updates, it does not really matter whether there are 100 or 100,000 fans if the content does not encourage engagement.
According to previous calculations, the value of a Facebook Page subscriber is indeed not merely the size of the audience, but a function of the audience size and the amount of content this audience is being exposed to. The more content offered to a larger audience, the better will the ROI of Facebook activities be.
Now we’re getting somewhere! Still, we would like to argue that Facebook users are not, unfortunately, equal. One thing to consider is also the average influence or ‘clout’ of your Facebook audience. Is your audience constantly in the top of the news feeds in their network, or are they passive, if not invisible users?
3) The ‘clout’ of each subscriber
According to the algorithm used in displaying content on Facebook’s news feeds, Facebook users who constantly post content that induces reactions are more likely to stay on top of their friends’ news feeds. Others, perhaps more passive users of Facebook might then get left in the dark even if the occasional status update or shared link might be of good content as such.
Services such as Klout.com are determined to calculate the ‘clout’ or influence of Facebook and Twitter users in order to offer some sense of the impact these people have within their networks. In other words, how noticeable their presence is, and how strongly they can influence others by sharing content.
This is one thing to remember when looking at the mere size of one’s Facebook Page audience. It indeed is not the size of the boat, but it does seem to be the motion in the ocean. A thousand strong Facebook influencers might offer more exposure to your brand than a ten-fold number of passive Facebook users. If an influencer ‘likes’ something, this will be noticed by a higher number of friends than the likings of more subtle users.
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As a conclusion, we feel that there should be at least three things considered when sizing up the compound value of your brand’s Facebook Page. There is the audience size, the amount and quality of content offered to that audience, and finally, the average influence your subscribers possess.
At Whitevector, we understand that acquiring and managing all of these measures, let alone comparing them to one’s competitors or industry might not be very simple. That is why we are currently working on new methods of measuring this data, and solutions such as ‘Facebook Influencers’ and ‘Fan Page Comparisons’ will be made available through our Chat Reports service in the near future.
Until then, stay tuned!
