Calculating the Value of Your Facebook Fans in Higher Ed: An Introduction

Tony Zanders

This article is part one of a larger series on Calculating the value of your Facebook fans as a college or university.

Introduction

What are the people who “Like” your institution’s Facebook Page worth?

Everyone tells us to get more students to like our Pages. Everyone tells us that we should try to engage those students with status updates, media and more. Everyone tells us that we should be viewing Facebook’s insights for those students. There’s even elaborate presentations that show us how many people like college and university Pages on Facebook, and even directories indexing Higher Ed Facebook Pages. But have we taken a step back to think about the worth of a student who likes our page? In other words, are we driven by the same things that big brands and celebrities are driven by?

In this article, I’ll discuss our take on the value of a Facebook fan for a college and university by interpreting and translating corporate for-profit trends into higher education speak.

A report was recently released titled, “The value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review,” which sought to help corporate brands understand the financial returns that people on Facebook can provide to a business. We’ve done some work to figure out if there are any valuable nuggets for higher education. Here are a few of the notable quotes from the study. These can also be viewed as things that Higher Ed has in common with Corporate Marketing:

1. Many brands overcomplicate their measurements requirements by tracking dozens of independent variables. Many oversimplify by trying to apply a single number concept of value, and far too many fail to quantify ROI in such a way as to convince a CFO of the merit of increasing or shifting investment towards Facebook marketing.
2. Marketers have been struggling to understand the impact of their Facebook marketing efforts contribution to their overall marketing success.
3. Many are attempting to establish the return through a campaign-based analysis rather than by consideration of long-term business value.
4. Understanding long-term Facebook fan value is a complex undertaking with advanced calculations required across multiple variables. This understanding is rooted in the measurable differences between users who have “fanned” a brand and those who have not.
5. The value is reflected not simply by the action of being a “fan” but rather by the value of the audience and the benefits “fanning” offers the brand.

Read Part 2 in the series about how to derive fan value.
Read Part 3 in the series about important statistics from the study.