We received a lot of attention last month when we attached a dollar value to every fan of a Facebook page. “marketers are clamoring for data to determine ROI,” observed Vitrue CEO Reggie Bradford. All that attention and feedback really shone a spotlight on the increasing sense of urgency around the answer to these fundamental questions:
- How do I get people at my company to believe this social media stuff is valuable?
- Once they buy in, how do I show them it was all worth it?
Short questions, right? How often have you found yourself providing a really long answer? When it comes right down to it “Return on Investment” should have a simple answer. People want that simple answer. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to just get that number?
We thought about this problem for a while, mulled it over, chewed on it, and decided that yes we have a way to give you a way to get that number. We had the technology. We just needed to sit down and build it.
So 25 hard-boiled employees, some of them coming back from f8 almost shaking with eagerness to dig into the new Graph API, gathered together over a weeked and basically from scratch made a Facebook Graph API App (with lots of bells and whistles) that will stick a dollar value on any page on Facebook. We call it the Social Page Evaluator, and we think it’s awesome.
Now, I think I need to point out that what you’ll see in the Evaluator isn’t the whole value of a page or fan. We can’t account for specific activities, media buys, or even customer LTVs. What we’ve built is one way to model a portion of the value of a page, based on earned media values. It’s a chunk of the story; we think maybe the hardest part to write for your brand, and we look forward to helping you tell it. Go ahead and try it: http://evaluator.vitrue.com
Enter the URL of any Facebook page and the Evaluator will examine its fan count, post frequency, and various fan interactions with the page and crunch the data using our original fan valuation, adding the equally vital aspect of “engagement”.
We get the data. We do math. We get a number. Then we put a dollar sign on it.
We stepped back and looked at our work, made that little square with our hands that movie directors make to size up a shot, and asked ourselves a question:
What if the user disagrees with our default assumption of $5 Earned Media Value per fan?
Good question. It makes sense that some pages will be able to achieve a higher, or lower, value per fan. No two businesses are exactly alike. So we added a slider for you to make your own assumption about how valuable a thousand impressions are for the posts on any particular page. It goes from $1 to $24. When you’ve got your mouse pointer on it, button held down, ask yourself “How much would I pay to reach this page’s fans?”
Once we had our core functionality straightened away, we took a deep breath and called it quits. Ok, that’s not true at all! We hunkered down to add even more functionality to our fledgling Web app. After all, we had the whole weekend.
For instance, it’s useful to know how much value you’re getting out of your page, but wouldn’t it be great to know how much value you COULD be getting? We put that on there too. It shows how much a page could be worth, with the same number of fans, if it were following all of our best practices (posting the right number of times a day for your brand, using multimedia posts a LOT, using a branded URL shortener, etc).
As you look at different page evaluations, the current and potential evaluations will be closer or farther from each other– you may see a page where they are the same, in which case take note! That page is maximizing the value of its current fans and just needs more fans. (Facebook ads are a great to let more people know about your page, btw.)
We figured people might want to know what exactly the best practices are, and where a page could use some improvement, so we added an evaluation of how closely the page is following our best practice guidelines for Facebook and taught the Evaluator how to give you advice on how to get there from here.
But wait! There’s more! (Or would you prefer “…and one more thing”?) We managed to cram even more stuff into the Evaluator during those 63 frenzied hours, stuff you really need to try. I could describe it all to you at length (and I just might do that in a blog post some time), but right now I’m going to assume you clicked that link up there several minutes ago and are already clicking away
- using the comparison tool to measure your brand against your competitors,
- cranking the stats waaaay up on the Fan-tasize tab to see your page’s value when you reach 10 million fans, and
- setting an alarm to remind your assistant to remind you to come back every day to track your page’s historical progress
The current state of the Social Page Evaluator should be considered “beta”. We even put a little “beta” sticker on the logo to help set your expectations properly. The application (you might think of it as a Web site, but we think of it as an application) works really well, but you might encounter a bug or two here and there. We encourage you to let us know if you find anything like that or just want to let us know what you think. Click the “feedback” link at the top of the Evaluator page.
We’re going to keep refining the existing features and squashing any bugs that are found. Oh, and, we have big plans for the future, let me tell you. We hope you find the Social Page Evaluator to be a useful tool for measuring the value of your social media efforts as well as indulging your curiosity and having a little fun.
This image shows three different versions of the Facebook Fan Box. At the top right corner of this page, you can see where we have implemented our Facebook Fan Box.
Today Vitrue was named an AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Winner. The OnMedia 100 winners were selected from among hundreds of other technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists and industry insiders. The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2009 list.
