Your Facebook page is all set up and ready for action. You built a following, and now you’re wondering what is it all for? Are you really getting traffic to the point of sale site the way you need to? Are you actually making salesand seeing any money come in from all of this? Do all those “likes” really mean anything of significance or are they hollow?  Does it all translate into being something that is actually worth your resources, or just an elaborate game?

Being real for a second, Facebook fans are pretty easy to compile. The key is not about grabbing the most fans, but rather the right fans. The quality of your audience does make a big difference. In the beginning, any fan will do because your main focus is to look like you have a ton of activity. How you are perceived matters. Once a base of followers is built up though, what are they really worth to you? Thanks to Jessica Lee and a friend who shared survey data from over 4,000 respondents, there are some metrics that demonstrate the actual value of Facebook fans which reinforces two principles – not all fans are created equally, and a good fan is money in the bank.

Before diving into the numbers, the data collected was from B2C companies alone and not B2B’s. How it may correlate to B2B type companies is something that is going to require more research. That is something we are really looking forward to seeing.

* Fans are 41% more likely to recommend a product they like to their friends than non-fans.
* Fans have a brand loyalty exceeding that of non-fans by 28%
* The average fan that “likes” items spends $71.84 more than non-fans on average.

The value of a fan goes beyond those numbers however, and likes on Facebook are not all equal as we stated earlier. If you already have a well recognized strong brand name outside of Facebook, likes tend to mean a little less. You generally already had a fan base before ever launching a Facebook campaign, and the likes you have tend to be in large part from people that are already using your product. One also has to consider the value of fan interaction when a company has an established fan base prior to Facebook. In this type of case, engagement is more toward customer support. It may not be directly making sales, but keeping existing customers happy and informed does indirectly help sales.

A Fan that “likes” an item once per year and visits the page maybe once every five weeks is not a terribly valuable commodity. What you are looking for are fans that may visit about every two weeks and “like” around ten items each year. Then the analysis can go even further into how many friends your fans have. The more friends they have, the more people there are that potentially see their “likes” making them more valuable. The reach of a particular person liking an item is important – the greater their reach, the more valuable their likes are.

The best strategy going forward with any serious Facebook campaign is to seek outside help to provide some insight into who your fans are and what they are really doing for you? You need answers two important questions like whether or not your fans can actually afford what you are selling? If they cannot, how valuable are they to you? How do you get the sporadically active fan more active? Is your fan base too big to manage on your own and is that a possible reason why you are not converting as much as your raw numbers would indicate you should be? These are all issues your professional SMM can analyze and act on to get you the best results.

In the final analysis, your fans are only as good as you compel them to be. Getting a ton of “likes” is good and valuable in a certain sense, but there is a lot of gray area between getting someone to hit the like button and visiting your site – and then opening up their wallet. Don’t discount Facebook like so many people do thinking it’s a fad or that some other network will knock them off. If you’re missing out on Facebook, you’re missing out on selling to the world.