A New Way to Calculate What Facebook is Worth to Your Business

FROM:
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-roi/a-new-way-to-calculate-what-facebook-is-worth-to-your-business/

May 23rd, 2011 @ 01:00 am › Jay Baer

You’re trying to accomplish the same things on Facebook that you are in email, aren’t you? You want to keep your business top-of-mind among people that are already aware of you, and encourage those people to buy again and tell their friends.

The number of Facebook “likes” you’ve accumulated is akin to your email list. The number of impressions your Facebook musings receive (findable in your Facebook Insights report) is akin to your email open rate. The number of thumb ups and comments on your musings is your Facebook feedback rate, which is statistically similar to click-through rate in email.

I’ve been thinking about the mechanical and psychological similarities between email and Facebook for quite a while, and some additional thoughts on these similarities can be found here.

But, until being inspired by a recent issue of AdAge (whose coverage of social media has gotten vastly better in the past 18 months), I’d never thought about valuing Facebook interactions within an email framework.

Valuing Facebook Through an Email Prism

Almost every company has some sort of email newsletter, and that communication channel has a cost associated with it, comprised of fees paid to send the email using a company like ExactTarget (client); fees or staff time needed to design email newsletters; analysis time; and probably some business rules and marketing time to think through sequencing, offers, subject lines, etc.

You can easily determine what that program costs your company on a per email basis, and what the equivalent “value” of your Facebook impressions are, based on your email investment. (download the spreadsheet below to help you calculate)

FOR THE SPREADSHEEt
http://www.slideshare.net/jaybaer/facebook-valuation-worksheet-convince-and-convert/download