Fan on Facebook, what are you worth.......

$136 according to recent research

Trying to place a monetary value on the effectiveness of any advertising is difficult, with social media being no different.

There has been a lot of press recently around the Facebook like button and the effects this has on the peer groups who are part of your online community, but what £ value does being a fan actually mean to brands?

A survey conducted by Syncapse attempts to shed some light onto this areas with some interesting assumptions and findings.

20 top brands analysed

Fans and non fans were compared to measure their previous, current and future behaviours towards these brands.

Being a fan for MacDonald’s – your likely to spend more than $159 more than a non fan.

Fans are nearly 30% more likely to continue being loyal to a brand. Being loyal is not an indication of your spend with that brand, however all of the metrics indicated a higher spend for fans than non fans across all brands.

Brand advocates and WOM

A huge part of social networking is the recommendation network, you telling your peers and friends about your preferences and recommendations. This is the oldest form of advertising, is the basis for viral and is deemed as ‘earned’ media by marketers – see bought owned and earned.

Being far from free ( your initial outlay and marketing to drive brand awareness ) it most certainly is a benefit for any brand to have working for it.

Fan

Facebook fans are 68% more likely to recommend a product or brand, with people more likely to buy if recommended by friend, with this onward recommendation resulting in over a third of these people actually trying the product.

The closeness of the recommender has an impact on this percentage, with family members scoring higher than those with loose social connections. To support this in a previous post I outlined how product types and the advocates peer standing and expert levels effect the onward performance of these recommendations– i.e they are regarded as an expert in the field of music, onwards recommendations have a more likely effect to influence than areas they are not.

It is important to remember that these fan basis exist already without Facebook, however the ability to monitor and articulate ‘numbers’ from the site gives an ability (albeit still open to conjecture) as to what these could be worth.

Full report here : http://www.syncapse.com/media/syncapse-value-of-a-facebook-fan.pdf

When your friends become spammers : http://onehandshake.blogspot.com/2007/02/when-your-friends-become-spammers.html