Share this:

(picture: @PSFK)

There’s been so much talk about the Facebook fan pages, that it’s almost annoying to add an article to the lot. However, there’s substantial evidence that, at the moment, the pages are so valuable – considering that you have managed to lure in lots of fans – that one more article doesn’t hurt.

I recently stumbled upon a survey (PDF), in which Syncapse estimated the value of Facebook fans by quantifying how much more money fans spent on the brand versus money spent by people who are not Facebook fans of the brand in question. Not surprisingly, people who like brands on Facebook also like them in real life – and spent more money on them as well. They also compared recommendations et cetera of fans vs. non-fans. I like their take on the matter, but the correlation between fandom and real life actions doesn’t really put value on the Facebook pages, because these people would spend and recommend more in any case.

Easier way to quantify the value of a facebook page is to compare it to something we already do – display advertising.

Here’s a formula that calculates page impressions per year and then estimates the cost of those impressions if they would be purchased as banners.

The impression rate is a factor that estimates how many times a single post is seen. In Finland, impressions can be as much as 6 times higher than the amount of fans from the Facebook stats, meaning that a wall post for 50000 fans would accumulate 300000 impressions – therefore the Impression rate would be 6 in Finland. The impressions accumulate when people are very active on Facebook and use the service many times a day, running up those page impressions. The international average is lower, the impression rate is closer to 1 in the states for example. CPM  – cost per mille (thousand in latin) – prices for banners vary considerably, the international conservative value would be 5 dollars per 1000 impressions, however, they run all the way up to 30 dollars, depending on the placement and size of the banner. CPM 22€ for largest banner on MTV3.fi and CPM 35€ for HS.fi’s. So, that’s were you’ll have to use your judgement – how valuable is it to see the post on your wall versus seeing a banner on a site.

For example, a page where you post 5 wall posts a week, with impressions rate 6 and 50000 fans, calculated at CPM 10€, would be worth 826000€ in banner advertising prices.

Advertisement