One question that always surprises me when people ask it is “What is the monetary value of a Twitter follower or Facebook like?”. Companies have tried to put a dollar amount on this metric (I’ve heard anywhere from $0.10 all the way to $200). Asking a question like this is the equivalent of asking “what is the value of a visit to my website” or “how much is an impression worth in my paid search campaign”. Forget about the fact that I think people who create a monetary value for this metric are likely running failed Social Media campaigns and are desperately trying to show some value for what they’re doing. The real problem with having this thought process is that every follower, like, website visitor, and impression is different and should be analyzed as such.
Since advertising campaigns were able to be tracked, the mindset has always been “bigger is better”. The more website visits, television commercial views (and now YouTube video views), Facebook likes, and Twitter followers the better. Why is this the case? I can buy traffic that will guarantee me 100,000 visitors in a month, purchase thousands of Twitter and Facebook connections, and pay hundreds of thousands of people to view my YouTube video. At the end of the day, this has very little value (if any value at all). If you pay $5,000 for 10,000 Twitter followers, will it produce over $5,000 in total revenue for your business? Chances are that it won’t.
The focus should always be quality over quantity. I’d much rather have 1,000 Twitter followers who are visiting my website and engaging regularly with my account than 20,000 followers who will rarely or never have any interaction with the brand. Yet to someone who places a price on a Twitter follower, the account with 20,000 followers is far more valuable. I think it’s prefectly okay to place some emphasis on the total number of connections your accounts have (especially if you’re growing them by natural means), but it should never be entirely what you base your Social Media success on. At the end of the day, if you only see growth in the number of your connections, but not anywhere else (website traffic, sales, social network interactions, etc.) what value do these connections really have?
Facebook
Twitter
Blog
