Author(s) : Andrew LIPSMAN – Graham MUDD – Mike RICH – Sean BRUICH

The true value of a Fan

The following summary’s purpose is the analysis of how social media brand impressions reach Fans and Friends throughout Facebook, as opposed to just on brand Fan pages. The study profiles three major brands – Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft Bing – to show the impact of these impressions on Fans and Friends and help illustrate how brands today need to be thinking about their social marketing initiatives.

While most brand marketers today are intensely focused on their social media efforts, many express frustration at the inability to quantify its value or incorporate it into their marketing mix. ComScore, the new ComScore social media measurement tool, looks at how much a "Like" is worth to a brand in terms of tendency to buy, media value, etc., rather than just looking at the number of friends or fans someone has.
Just a few representative numbers : brands that conduct Facebook marketing can gain huge benefits by targeting the friends of their Facebook fans, as Facebook users spend 27% of their time browsing homepage newsfeeds.

The findings of this report give a better understanding of how and where brand messages are reaching consumers. In addition to tracking social mentions, marketers should be sure to monitor the amount of traffic driven to their sites by social content marketing.

In conclusion, we can say that integrated content marketing and a consistent brand experience are essential to social media success.

But we need to look beyond…
According to this report, Facebook ‘likes’ is definitely a good idea for brands. But the brands ought to go beyond ‘likes’ and ‘fans’. The brands need to build a model on social medias that goes beyond just accumulating fans to focus their efforts on targeting fans who show active engagement to the brand.

My personal analysis…
Just because your brand has thousands of fans, that doesn’t mean that thousands of new customers will start buying your products, but the more friends you have, the more value you provide to a brand as when you take actions on the Page, these will be spread to a bigger number of people.

Tags: Branding, Facebook, Fans, Value, Business Model, Targeting