While Facebook marketing is considered valuable, how much it is actually worth is an open question. A company called Vitrue, however, is trying to put a quantitative number on how much these pages are worth.
Starbucks boasts 7 million-plus ‘likes’ (Facebook recently retired the ‘fan’ nomenclature for brands). When calculating based on an earned media CPM value of $5, that number yields a $20.7 million annual page value, writes Brian Morrissey. Coke, with its 5.5 million likes, has an annual page value of $4.6 million, based on this system. Skittles, which has 4.4 million likes, is worth $7.7 million, per Vitrue.
Vitrue’s Social Page Evaluator looks at number of posts and interactions, and not just number of brand connections. This means that smaller fan bases could actually have more valuable communities with more posts.
While the default was set to $5, the number is flexible, depending on what marketers think comparable impressions would cost in paid media. “We went with a conservative number of $5,” said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue. “[But] we wanted to give a marketer the ability to change that.”
Vitrue believes that most companies are not using their Facebook pages well enough. The firm suggested posting roughly twice a day as a good best practice, but Vitrue noted that many fail to post photos and videos and end up not using Facebook social tools like the “share” button.
Recently, Vitrue put the value of individual Facebook connections at $3.60 per year, depending on how often it would be featured in a news feed based upon standard media impression rates. “The bigger picture we’ve been saying for a while is Facebook is becoming the operating system of the Internet,” said Reggie Bradford, Vitrue’s CEO.
Source: AdWeek
