Facebook numbers do matter

As the boat glides...

First there was Facebook and then there were business pages on Facebook. That is when the big race for the ‘fan’ began! The nearby barber kept wondering as to why corporate honchos are running to get a fan when they have ACs in their offices, pardon the PJ 😀

Currently people are slowly realising that its really not about getting an x number of fans to consider your social media activities a success. Targeting the right audience is more important than counting the numbers! Simple quality over quantity principle. Due to these events now a days I have heard a phrase by a lot of social media marketeers which says ‘The numbers don’t really matter!’. The thing is that while I can see what they are trying to say, what is important to understand is that while its crucial to target the ‘right fans’ – after that, it is actually about the number of fans to get some conversion to happen where a fan actually buys your product/service!

Its not really some rocket science for most brands to get their target audience on their social communities… once a clear segment of people are identified and got onto the brand communities the onus of social media would be on engaging them, converting them to customers AND it will also be on recruiting more fans! So its actually a very clear math, Facebook fan numbers do matter as long as they are genuine. In fact in online media a good number of fans is very important because,
Social Media is NOT Free! Looking at the costs of maintaining an active social media community and consistently engaging with fans, I think its better if companies shell out some initial money to build a good number of fans using their client email databases, FB ads, WOM or other means. After all if the client wants a ROI then there needs to be a decent sized community to begin with!

Online conversion rate: The online conversion rates can be measured and have been found to be very low. In newspaper advertisements, no one knows how many people actually saw the ad and how many sales it generates. Now that online conversion rates have been found to be so low, a large community is needed for the client to get actual business from the fans.

Having said this its also important to highlight that the activities from getting fans to generating sales is no way a small task and needs a lot of work! Its also the topic for another blog post 🙂