What’s a ”Like” Worth?

July 21, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News

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But Facebook is eating into big swaths of the measured Web. As people spend a larger portion of their time on Facebook, the social network is developing tools that make it easier for marketers to reach their targets, and customers are increasingly interested in engaging with brands on Facebook. In switching their emphasis to Facebook, marketers give up control over much of the valuable data that their users leave behind.

While Facebook can provide real names of people who “like” a product, it doesn’t provide data on what sites are sending traffic to a fan page, how long visitors are spending there and how they’re moving around inside it. No additional analytics services can be installed on Facebook pages.

“We are absolutely at the disposal of Facebook regarding these metrics,” says Chris Bowler, social media vice president at interactive ad agency Razorfish, which builds Facebook pages and freestanding websites for brands such as Axe and Carnival Cruise Lines. Facebook’s own advertising platform is roughly as sophisticated as the big networks’, but it’s harder to integrate with other data services. “We can’t connect the dots,” says Bowler.

Facebook now has 750 million users and reaches 43% of all Internet users worldwide, according to Alexa, up from 35% a year ago. Facebook now hosts perhaps 4 million fan pages, branded sites operated by companies, celebrities and enthusiasts.

One of them is the President of the United States. Barack Obama’s campaign website was attracting 8 million unique visitors per month as the 2008 election approached. This year Obama announced his reelection campaign on Facebook and has integrated Facebook’s registration system into barackobama.com. “We may never see another [freestanding] campaign website that gets that kind of traffic,” says Mindy Finn, a partner at social media advisory EngageDC. “All of that activity has just moved on to other platforms.”

The most common interaction between consumers and brands on Facebook is to either “like” a brand as a fan or “share” some piece of that brand’s content such as a video or photo. The meaning of these gestures is ambiguous. Some users “like” a page in order to announce their affinity to friends; others respond to an incentive such as a free sample in exchange for publicly associating themselves with a brand. Once a user has “liked” a page, updates from that page show up in her Facebook news stream where her friends can see it, too–an important hook for viral marketing.

Lots of marketing types have tried to peg the value of a Facebook fan. Their methods and estimates vary widely, reflecting the new-and-untested nature of Facebook marketing: Group-sales service ChompOn found that the average Facebook “share” led to $14 in sales at the company’s website. Vitrue, a consultancy, figures that bringing a customer on as a fan is worth between 44 cents and $3.60 in increased sales from the engagement that Facebook encourages.

Facebook has suggested that people who want to use Google Analytics or Omniture should use links on their Facebook pages to send visitors to sites where those services are installed and then analyze the traffic that results–sort of like watching shadows on a wall to figure out what’s going on in the next room.