What’s a ‘fan’ really worth?
A social branding firm in Atlanta says $3.60 based on the following formula:
1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions
60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000
Of course this will be debated ad nauseum in comments to blogs, including this one. In today’s marketing metrics driven environment it is important to determine the value of your social media efforts. That being said, I think the value per fan depends much more on who the fan is than the number of fans (i.e. higher attribution for tastemakers, brand champions, etc.). There is a high standard of deviation from the mean.
Services such as Nutshell Mail (disclaimer: client) help bridge the gap between facebook fandom and actionable email newsletters. The key to deriving value through social media efforts is converting fans to sales or at least in-network product recommendations. Note that the terminology is changing, with “becoming a fan” becoming “like”.
