Metz, The Social Concept

What is it worth to get 69,458 Friends?

June 24, 2009

C-level stakeholders clients (CMOs, EVPs, etc.) frequently ask our team to help them quantify the value of marketing “touches” on the social web. Let’s say that 2500 people read your branded blog, weekly – what’s that worth?

Well, let’s step back 9 years and cost things out using an older digital marketing/outreach paradigm: email. What would it have been worth in the year 2000?

If you’d had 2500 people receiving your email weekly (assuming the same “open” rate as your blog is currently being read), you’d be spending about $300 per month for those “touches,” or about 12 cents per touch.

That said, what is it worth for our former client, the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau , to have 69,458 daily Facebook “touches” with their customers and prospects. Well, from what we know of the world of email marketing, that kind of reach would cost about $11,000 per month.

Factor in the viral power of the average Facebook user, which is to say that about 1/2 of a percent of the SFCVB’s users share their content, and this asset is suddenly worth another $24,000 per month due to its viral reach (104k additional touches per day), for a total of $35,000.

In a social network service implementation (i.e. Facebook Fan Page), you figure that acceptable churn would be in the 1%-3% range, per month, so, the brand would have to add new users, to account for any loss.

The total annual value of this marketing asset, if you cost it out using the “email” metric, is $420,000.

That comes out $6 a head.

Drop us a line if you’d care to find out what kind of budget resource that would require.

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