What’s a Facebook fan page worth?
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Vitrue, a social media research firm, has rolled out a tool for companies trying to figure out how to value their Facebook fan page.
Dubbed Social Page Evaluator, the tool attempts to help companies determine the page’s potential revenues and marketing impact.
Visitors need only to input a Facebook fan page’s URL into the search box and click the ‘submit’ button. From there, the tool processes the page, looking at the number of fans it has, how many posts the owner has added, and more. It then determines the page’s annual value to its owner.
How the Social Page Evaluator gets to that figure is somewhat complicated. Using its own calculation based on a page’s fans, post frequency, and interactions, it comes to a figure that is then multiplied by a dollar amount. That dollar amount is defaulted to $5. The $5 is a general estimate of how much a company is gaining in value for each increase to the aforementioned figure.
Whether or not the Social Page Evaluator is accurate is unknown. Companies don’t typically divulge how much revenue they generate from Facebook, and Vitrue’s $5 figure could be high or low, depending on the page.
Regardless, the tool could be valuable to brands that might be looking to extend their social marketing efforts. It derives its page evaluations based on Vitrue’s own research on a slew of items, including its discovery that two posts-per-day is ideal for a Facebook page. It has even found the sweet spot for short URLs and the kind of posts added to a page.
Starbucks, for example, has one of the most highly valued fan pages. According to Vitrue’s tool, the Starbucks fan page is currently valued at more than $20 million in annual worth to the company. But because the company doesn’t post enough and it typically posts text content, rather than video or audio, it loses significant value. In fact, Vitrue’s tool contends that Starbucks’ page could be worth more than $76 million if the company optimized its page.
One of the most underutilized pages belongs to Whole Foods. According to the Social Page Evaluator, the health food store’s page is currently worth just more than $44,000. But if the company started sending out posts to its more than 249,000 fans, it could be worth more than $2 million.
Social Page Evaluator is free to use.
-- Don Reisinger