How Much is Your Facebook Page Worth?

These days, just about every business with any kind of online presence has a Facebook page.  Social media for your business is such a great way to connect with customers and manage service, vendor, and colleague relationships – all for free – that it’s really a no-brainer.  B

ut sometimes we all need validation that our social media efforts are paying off.  Determining a dollar value connected to those efforts is a great way to do that, if you can, but how is that possible?  Well, when it comes to your Facebook page, now there’s a way.  The tool, rolled out in March of this year, to figure out your page’s value is the Vitrue Social Page Evaluator (SPE).

How it works

The Social Page Evaluator uses a calculation that factors in fan count, customer activity, brand activity, and a proprietary engagement multiplier. The data represents a monetary valuation of a single Facebook page based on standard digital marketing metrics, impressions, and fan exposure. The score includes a configurable cost-per-thousand-impressions (Earned Media Value) measurement that defaults to $5.  The simple slide button allows you to adjust the EMV so you can customize your valuation based on your own industry-specific figures.

The SPE operates on publicly available information. If a page targets posts by geo-location, language, or age, these posts will not be incorporated into the evaluation. Any posts set, by their author, to have restricted viewership will also be excluded from the evaluation.

Cool factor

In addition to providing you with an annual value for your Facebook page, the SPE has a couple of cool features that are both fun and potentially eye-opening.  First, you get two values regarding your page – your current value, and potential value.  This gives you an estimate of your page’s potential if you continue on your current path, and it provides a good benchmark if you want to push the limits of that potential.  You also get an evaluation of how well you’re following best practices, including Post Frequency, Post Type, and Short URL.  Use these evaluations to tweak your FB activity to pump up your page’s value.

The other cool feature that SPE offers is the ability to compare your page with other companies’ pages.  It can be fun to look up pages like Starbucks, which has a potential value of around $91 million, or Google’s current page value of just under $6 million.  More importantly though, you can compare your page’s value with your competitors to see how you stack up in your sector.  This can give you an idea of your online reach and influence, which is becoming more and more important as social media grows as a communications channel.

To provide an example, we ran the SPE on the Young Entrepreneur Facebook page, and here’s what we learned:

1. Our page’s value is about $32,000, with a potential value of $42,000.
2. We’re doing great on post frequency, posting at optimal times, often enough, and not too often to lose engagement points.
3. We could do a little better at posting multi-media content for better engagement.
4. When we post URLs, SPE says they should be shorter and easy to type without using shorteners.  (Not sure how we would accomplish this or why it matters, as people are far more likely to just click the link than type it, but it’s worth thinking about.)

So this is a pretty cool and useful tool for anyone with a Facebook page for their business.  Check it out!