Bulmers and We Are Social have conducted a study to find the real monetary of their Facebook fans versus non-fans, and have come up with a figure of £3.82 per week, or £198.64 annually. The figure was the result of a questionnaire put to fans on a tab on the Bulmers Facebook page, where answers were then compiled to analyse the uplift in brand value per fan. These results were then compared to a sample group of cider drinkers, to compare. The research is interesting as it aims to look beyond the perceived media value of a fan on Facebook, and looks for real monetary value. Essentially how being a fan on Facebook encourages you to buy into a product more.
In highlights of the research, presented on the We Are Social blog, you can see how Facebook fans compared to the sample cell, showing a clear preference towards Bulmers:
Also, they analysed the average retail value of fans, looking at how many Bulmers they claimed to drink per week:
Why this matters
An obvious reaction to a study like this, might well be that, of course, fans of a Bulmers Facebook page are going to be worth more than non-fans. They’re fans after all. But that’s not what this study is trying to prove. Rather than showing that Facebook fans actually do like your brand, it’s putting a direct monetary value on an individual fan, which is an important benchmark for brands.
Using this, you can then accurately assess the impact of further marketing activities on Facebook and whether this impacts retail positively or negatively. So if you run a campaign purely to build numbers on your page, and you run a concurrent questionnaire that shows the retail value of a fan has dropped, you know the campaign is a dud.
The methodology behind it might not exactly be groundbreaking and indeed in some ways is more primitive than something like Net Promote Score, but applying this methodology to Facebook could help in determining the true value of your fans.