What’s a Facebook Like Worth?
Facebook and comScore recently published a white paper on “How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing.” The document is full of some pretty interesting case studies on Starbucks, Southwest and Bing, with regards to how they use their Facebook Pages to generate interest, buzz and business.
How to Measure a Like
What’s interesting to me is that we’re finally getting away from measuring ROI for social media in the terms of “this interaction = this in sales.” It’s about time. According to the white paper, Facebook fans can be valued in several ways:
- By increasing the depth of engagement and loyalty of fans
- By generating incremental purchase behavior
- By influencing friends of fans
So you can see, it’s hard to put a dollar amount on any one of these values, yet they are all tremendously valuable.
Why Friends of Fans Are Important
Another tidbit I learned from this report is the importance of friends of fans of a brand’s Facebook Page. If you’re a fan of, say, Starbucks, there’s a pretty good chance your Facebook friends might be interested in the brand as well. And brands realize this. According to Facebook, in looking at the top 100 brand Pages, they determined that for every brand’s fan, there are another 34 friends of fans that the brands can reach. So exponentially, you can reach a lot more people than just those who click “Like” on your Page.
About Susan Payton
Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Communications, an Internet marketing firm specializing in content marketing, social media management and press releases. She is also the Founder of How to Create a Press Release. 
It’s implied by a lot of what you’re saying, but the worth of a “Like” is greatly impacted by the amount of interaction. If your brand gets a lot of comments and likes on a post, more people see you in their feeds (thanks to edge rank or whatever they call it). So you need to post things that get interaction.
The only way to generate more “likes” is to get more “likes!” It’s true–the more often you post (without getting annoying), the more exposure your brand will get.
@Robert–Absolutely. Having the likes doesn’t do much for you if you don’t use your page frequently.
@Ashley–It’s the snowball effect!
[...] media? Try Flyte’s post on the subject. You might also find Small Business Trends’ post What’s a Facebook Like Worth [...]
The “likes” on Facebook is like the degrees of separation game. By putting up great content for people to like, eventually an influencer will like your post, and all the people who follow him/her will see this. Things can go viral very quickly.
[...] This is from my post on Small Business Trends. [...]
Really “Likes” on Facebook Page matters, Suppose you have a brand and have five thousands of Likes on that, it means that when you are posting an update it is moving from 5,000 to 10,000 and so on and if your update is catchy then it will be a “hit” for your Business.
[...] someone Likes your Facebook Page, they are allowing you access to their online news feed. This is a big deal and [...]