This headline may hurt lots of feelings. But don’t take it personal. How do they say? It’s just business. Forrester tries to answer the question of the potential value of a Facebook fan with the best marketing approach, which would mean that the value of a Facebook fan should be considered as $0, as long as a brand cannot face value in their Facebook fan base.

ConceivablyTech is just three months old and despite current common marketing sense, I have not put too much effort into creating a Fanbook fanbase. It certainly has to do with limited resources and our passion to write rather than to market, but I would be lying if I said I hate to see our fan base grow. But then, it seems that there is no immediate value to a Facebook fan base, at least if we believe Forrester’s Augie Ray.

“It is a question I hear several times a week:  What is the value of a Facebook fan?  I’ve seen answers ranging from $136.38 to $3.60,” he writes.  “I can’t blame vendors, agencies and consultants for trying to answer the question – the hunger from clients is so great that anyone promising a simple answer is likely to get attention.  The problem is that there is no simple answer to such a complex question. In fact, it may be best if marketers approached this question as if the answer is zero — unless and until the brand does something to create value with Facebook Fans.”

Ray says that it is difficult to assess the value of a Facebook fan, because such an estimate would rely on blurry assumptions, because different fans tend to behave differently, because organically acquired fans have potentially more value than those who were acquired through an incentive, and because the value of a Facebook fan has to be determined how much he spends.

“The smart marketer will approach the question of value as if the answer is zero – there is no intrinsic value to a Facebook fan,” says Ray. “This might sound sacrilegious to social media marketers, but think of it this way:  What’s the value of an email subscriber if the company never uses the database for anything?  And what’s the value of the same email subscriber if the company has a smart, user-focused strategy for email?  It is what companies do with fans that creates value, not merely that a brand has fans.”

Who can argue with that? Well, perhaps those who simply see satisfaction in the fact that they outfriend a rival on Facebook, but it is not difficult to see that Ray has a point. “A Facebook fan has one primary value in the absence of activation by brands, and that is for risk mitigation, but even that value is made greater when brands foster stronger relationships with engaged fans,” Ray wrote.

Here at CT* (as we like to call it) we are happy that we have just 200 fans and just in case you are interested, a portion of those 200 Facebook fans showed up about 2000 times on our pages last month. Google may put a value of a few pennies on that, but we are very grateful that you guys read our articles.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.