What is the Value of a Tweet or Facebook Fan?

What is the value of a Facebook Like? What is the $$ figure for a Facebook Fan? What is a Twitter Follower worth? What is the value of a Tweet or reTweet?

Last week I bought a coupon for Zumba classes from one of the daily deal sites. I received a 50% discount but there was a catch. 1000 coupons had to be sold before the deal became active. Luckily, next to every deal on offer is a button that connects to Facebook. Click the Facebook “Like” button and all your Facebook friends and family and colleagues will see the special deal too. Within a couple of hours the 1000 coupons were sold out, by customers promoting the deal to other customers. My coupon came through and I will now actually have to go to Zumba classes! Activating social networks to sell your products or services is a brilliant idea – so shall we see what a tweet or Facebook fan is worth to businesses?

Recently, companies started to reveal the dollar value of sales made by customers who see a Facebook friend promoting a product. ChompOn, a daily deals group buying service similar to the one I used to buy Zumba tickets revealed that a Facebook share was worth $14 dollars each to them. That’s incredible. Every time a customer clicks the Like button, telling friends and family of the deal, ChompOn earns $14 in sales commission. But could this work for other companies?

Social conference company EventBrite found that an event, shared with Facebook friends, resulted in $2.52 worth of ticket sales per Facebook member “share”. Eventbrite doesn’t organise the events themselves – anyone can join and put an event online, Eventbrite handles the ticket payments and takes a small fee for the sale of that ticket. So $2.52 per ticket sold is a very nice revenue earner for Eventbrite, and they were able to raise $20 million in funding late last year.

Facebook “likes” also work for organisations such as Just Giving, a social fundraising service. You can create a webpage on their site and share it with friends to raise money for your favourite charity. They discovered that six “likes” are needed for one donation. and that one “like is worth around 8 dollars.

It seems to me that with hard statistics coming out now on the value of Facebook members “liking” products and services online, that we are becoming sales people for companies. Do you think that with our friends and family trusting us more than strangers, what we choose to “like” or not, will have a big impact on companies revenue in the future?

Here’s some statistics for you:

Eventbrite – Online Ticketing, Social Conference Organiser

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone

• shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales.
  
• In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43,
• and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90.
  
• Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook.
  
• On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.
• On average, each shared link on Facebook results in 11 new visits to Eventbrite, compared to 7 visits per share across all channels.

From TechCrunch.

ChompOn Daily Deals Group Buying

• Facebook Share $14
• Facebook Like $8
• Twitter Tweet $5
• Twitter Follower $2

chompon_social_action_value
JustGiving Not For Profit

From the JustGiving blog

Here are the numbers from the 17th November to the 4th December:

5,986: the number of ‘likes’ of JustGiving fundraising pages

16,278: the number of visits to JustGiving fundraising pages from Facebook ‘like’ links

933: the number of donations from people who clicked on ‘like’ links in Facebook

Those of you who are keen on maths (who isn’t?!) will have worked out from that…

6% of visitors from ‘liked’ links on Facebook end up donating

On average, six ’likes’ are needed for one donation (the ratio of ‘likes’ to actual donations is 6:1)

One ‘like’ is effectively worth around £5 (assuming the average donation is like the rest of the site: £32)

If we extrapolate that further, and take the overall amount of 26,981 distinct ‘likes’ since their release on the 29th September and assume each is worth £5, ‘like’ buttons have generated £134,000 to charities on JustGiving in the last two months.

Active.com Team Sports Directory

At Active.com, we’ve found that:

• each link shared on Facebook is worth about $1.45 in either race registration conversions or ad impressions.
• Twitter is much more in-line with EventBrite’s number – around $0.40 per shared link.
• So, the more fans we have, the higher these numbers go.

PowerReviews

This is based on an analysis of several factors, but the following 4 things really drive it:
1) 130 = average friends/user
2) 6.5% = CTR on Facebook stream (note: this is 6X what you see on a Fan page)
3) 1.3% = Conversion rate (originating from FB); [2.9% is industry avg, Forrester]
4) $132 = average value of ecommerce sale (Forrester)

This is for In-Stream posts. Note that Fan Pages Get Much Lower CTRs. Ask yourself:
-When’s the last time you went to a fan page, let alone clicked on a link?
-When you post to your stream how likely is it a friend will like/comment?

Turns out for product reviews, 70% of shares get liked/commented.
Moreover, 57% of reviews are posted to user streams, IF that reviewer is logged in through Facebook connect (ie, once they get over that hump, they will probably post to their stream, about 7% choose to be Facebook verified).

Syncapse THE VALUE OF A FACEBOOK FAN – An Empirical Review

This study will examine the five leading contributors to Facebook fan value.

• (1) Product Spending
• (2) Brand Loyalty,
• (3) Propensity to Recommend,
• (4) Brand Affinity and
• (5) Earned Media Value.

• On average, fans spend an additional $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those who are not fans.
• Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand.
• Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends.

Summary
White Paper: Value of a Facebook Fan – An Empirical Review
Worth a read

I wanted to bookmark some hard figures not soft ROI on this blog. There is a debate we can have on whether you can always measure Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers this way. I mean, if you get a Like on Facebook for a Mercedes, is it the same value as a Country Bake Bread “share”? If someone “likes” your Page, they are probably already customers, so can we look at acquisition of customer figures? Vitrue have a Fanpage Calculator though there’s a bunch of criticism of Absurd Social Media Analytics  on FutureBuzz. Plus it doesn’t work for scarcity based social sales where you just want to sell ONE house. Still, it’s interesting to see where companies are going with this, and how Facebook Likes (Fans) and Shares, and Twitter Followers and Tweets are being valued.