Marketing Pilgrim

It’s notoriously difficult to measure the value of social media—but apparently not impossible. Social media specialist Vitrue looked at its clients’ data for Facebook to determine exactly how much a Facebook fan is worth, as AdWeek reports, and they came up with a number: $3.60.

Vitrue’s clients boast a combined 41 million Facebook fans. For the most part, each fan yielded an extra impression. They assumed twice-daily posts bringing in 60M impressions and used a $5 CPM, “meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. Using Vitrue’s calculation, Starbucks’ 6.5 million fan base — acquired in part with several big ad buys — is worth $23.4 million in media annually.”

Not all brands are created equal. Vitrue found wildly divergent impression-to-fan ratios. Some marketers generated just .44 impressions per fan, while another saw 3.6 impressions. [Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue,] chalked that up to sexier brands having more engaged connections, giving them access to the news feed more often. The impressions are not unique.

The $3.60 figure is the value over the course of a year, but is only a basic figure, since it doesn’t take into account engagement value, or the value of secondary mentions (such as when your fan page activity shows up on a user’s profile, and someone who isn’t your fan sees the post).

What do you think? What are Facebook fans worth to your company?