We all know that every company out there should have a Facebook page- it increases brand visibility, it allows customers to interact with the company more, and hopefully builds loyalty to the brand. But one of the biggest problems with this type of social networking is what metrics to use… Is Facebook really helping your brand? Does it really make a difference to your bottom line?
While browsing through some of the material on EConsultancy, I was interested in a figure that at least partially addresses this. Rather than focusing on the issue of retention and customer loyalty, a recent study went to examine how much traffic does a Facebook page drive TO a company’s webpage. According to their study on leading retailers, each new Facebook fan acquired by a company results in an extra 20 page views of that company’s website.
The study focused on the share of all clicks each retailer received versus the share of all clicks after a visit to the company’s Facebook page. I think it is particularly interesting how they are measuring the number of people being driven to the company website from the Facebook page and not vice versa. As the article points out, however, there still remains no real way to determine what amount of these visits ends up resulting in sales.
2 comments:
I think what's interesting is that there is no universal standard to measure the success of facebook pages for brands and brands are aware of this. For example, even Audi's GM of Social Media admits, "Today the equation to measure that doesn't exist."
...and what's even troubling, they don't even care. Is this a sign of a social media advertising bubble?
Does Social Media Have A Return On Investment?
Measuring the worth of social media is obviously a hot topic right now. I actually read an interesting article today about a recent Twitter marketing experiment done by Fab.com. The company had Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose each send a special link to their twitter followers that offered $10 off their first purchase just for signing up. It turns out that although Ashton has more followers on Twitter (7.3MM vs. Kevin's 1.3MM), Kevin actually had a higher percentage of his followers sign up. This resulted in Kevin bringing in more sales for the site than Ashton, ($7,121 vs. only $2,183 for Kutcher over one week).
This experiment proves two things: 1). You can in fact quantify the sales impact of social marketing and 2). Just because someone has more followers doesn't mean they will have a greater influence on the bottom line.
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