The horse-shit you read about Social Media Marketing and the true value of a Facebook Fan can come from any place these days, not just from Silicon Valley. Here’s proof: a nice “study” coming from an Advertising Agency in Zagreb, Croatia.
So, here’s how it goes: they took 8 brands which had Facebook Pages — and I don’t even want to think that they may have chosen them to make their study look better. Let’s say they did not take out any brand page that had poor numbers. They calculated the average number of impressions per status and then divided that number by the number of fans each company had. This was, in their opinion, the “number of impressions per fan”, even though, to their credit, they were the first to point out that it was very possible that part of these impressions were viewed by people coming from either Facebook or search engines who were not “fans” of those brands. There is no mention in the study of the average number of posts these brands made on their Facebook Pages; however, they are very happy to think that if those brands made a post every single day, Christmas included, their fans would be ecstatic – I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a post a day from their favourite brand of beer? (and cookies, breakfast cereal, toothpaste, home appliances, toilet paper etc). Multiply that by 5 years (seems legit: read a post a day from your favourite beer for 5 years) during which, of course, Facebook would never change its rules like it does every other month, and you get 2,646 impressions per fan. If those impressions were bought at $ 10 CPM like they were banner ads (banner ads on average sell for $ 10 CPM in Croatia? Really??), then there you have it: every fan on Facebook is worth $ 26.46. Yeah!