What’s the monetary value of a fan of your Facebook Page?

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: April 16th, 2010 | 11 Comments | Posted in: Facebook, Marketing online, Social media, social media marketing, Social networking

Have you ever reviewed the lifetime value of a customer? Well what about the value of a member of your community on your Facebook Fan Page?

Is that something that you could or should measure to evaluate the return on your investment in social media marketing?

According to research by social technology company Vitrue they have estimated that a Facebook Page with 1 million fans is worth a minimum of US$3.6 million in earned media annually.

They sampled data across 45 million fans and sampled data across varying pages from digital entertainment to retail to B2B and reviewed how many impressions a single wall post can receive.

They found that a Facebook Page with 1 million fans could create 1 million impressions with a single post to the wall.

They then took a value of US$5 CPM resulting in a Facebook page with 1 million fans being equivalent to US$300,000 in earned media per month or $3.6 million annually.

The challenge I would have for these numbers would be, are you really sure that you are far from assured that each post you make to your Facebook fan page wall will be viewed by each and every fan or even 25% of your fans? I know that I don’t see or check for content from every Facebook Page I am a fan of. Yes there are some Facebook Pages I go to regularly as they are adding value and I enjoy their content, and there are some I take notice of more closely when I see them in my Facebook News Feed.

Managing a Facebook Page you have to be careful not to post too frequently or you could find fans of your page deciding to ‘un-fan’ you or hide your content.

For me, successful Facebook marketing is not about the number of fans of your page or the number of Facebook wall posts that you make. It’s about creating a community and posting content that is relevant and engaging for them. Just as with an email marketing data base would you rather have a data base of 30,000 people who have opted in to receive your ezine but never read or even open your email, or a smaller loyal community who value your content and respond to your offers and buy your products or services?

But what do you think? Are you measuring the ROI of your Facebook Page? Is having a community of 1 million or even 100,000 what you are looking to build?