I recently had to estimate the number of conversions to expect from a new business Facebook page. The first step and biggest challenge was estimating the number of fans to expect for the page. I couldn’t find any existing formulas nor much good, publically-accessible data to aid me. So I came up with a methodology and dug up relevant statistics. Putting it all together, I was able to provide fan acquisition numbers that I think are in the ballpark. I’ve documented it all in this post, in case you want to use the same methodology or the data that I uncovered.
Here’s my method, at a high level:
Estimate the number of seed followers for your page. These are the customers or leads that you expect you can get to “like” your page through your initial efforts to spread the word after you go live.
Estimate the number of new followers you’ll acquire via the Facebook page.
These are the customers who will discover and like your page primarily through sharing within Facebook. You will also want to factor in followers obtained via badges on your site and any Facebook ad campaigns you’ll conduct.
One note, I’m only considering American Facebook users in this post. Though you can use the same methodology and simply apply data for your country.
Estimate seed followers
You’ll need some method of getting your initial followers. If you’ve built a solid strategy to accompany your page, you’ve already determined tactics for getting initial followers. These Facebook fans may be primarily existing customers, as in my case, or leads. In either event, you need to know:
- The percent of your target customers/leads who are on Facebook.
- The expected conversion rate of these Facebook customers: the percent of customers/leads who have Facebook accounts and that you plan to solicit as Facebook followers, who will choose to “like” your page.
Target customers on Facebook
Estimating the percentage of target customers who are actually on Facebook was my first challenge. A simple approach is to look at the percentage of Americans who are on Facebook. Currently, that number is about 40% (slightly less). Let’s say that you’re going to email all of your existing customers, as well as put a Like button on the pages on your website. You’re going to reach all of your existing customers, so multiply the number of existing customers you have times 40% to get an idea of the number of your customers on Facebook.
If you have more demographic information about your clients, you can take it a step further. For my purposes, I factored in the percentage of Americans on Facebook by age range and the percentage of affluent Americans on Facebook. These were relevant demographic factors for my client. Other factors might include ethnicity, gender, college education, and geographical location. Here’s some of the data I gathered which you might find useful, as well as pointers to some other data.
Percentage of Americans on Facebook by Age Range
(Note: different sources used different age ranges)
| Age Range | Source: iStrategy |
Source: Quantcast |
Source: Edison* |
| 18-24 | 25% | 77% | |
| 25-34 | 25% | 65% | |
| 35-54 | 39% | ||
| 18-34 | 42% | ||
| 35-49 | 20% | ||
| 50+ | 12% | ||
| 35-44 | 51% |
iStrategy; Quantcast; Edison
*Note that Edison’s numbers for social networks, in general, not just Facebook.
Affluence
I wanted to know what percentage of Americans in different income brackets were on Facebook. I was unable to find that exact information (if you have it, please send me a link!). I did find this relevant data, though:
| Income Range | Percent of Facebook Users in this Range |
| $0-$30K | 14% |
| $30K-60K | 24% |
| $60-$100K | 30% |
| $100K+ | 32% |
With regard to people that have a profile on some social network, Nielsen evaluated which social networks people had accounts on, by income bracket. “An analysis based on household income produces similar findings: compared with profile owners earning $50,000 or more per year, those with annual household incomes of less than $50,000 per year are significantly more likely to have a profile on MySpace (64% vs. 36%) and much less likely to have a profile on LinkedIn (6% vs. 22%). The proportion of high- and low-income profile owners with a profile on Facebook is similar—71% of profile owners earning less than $50,000 per year have a profile on Facebook, compared with 77% of those earning more than $50,000 per year.”
The most important data for my purposes came from a 2010 American Express study of affluent consumers: “Four in ten (37 percent) of affluent and wealthy consumers currently use Facebook.”
Gender
At this point, Facebook is pretty evenly split between men and women. The variations in social network use between men and women are small enough that I wouldn’t consider it a significant factor.
Ethnicity
A January 2009 Pew Internet study had these figures for overall social network use by different ethnicities:
| White | 31% |
| African-American | 43% |
| Hispanic | 48% |
Facebook’s more recent analysis indicated that 11% of its users are African-American (12% of the US population is African American.) 9% of Facebook users are Latinos, while they make up 15% of the US population.
Geography
Here are links to some studies showing Facebook use by state:
http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/07/usa-facebook-usage-statistics-by-state.html (2009)
http://mashable.com/2010/04/05/facebook-us-infographic/ (2010) This link also has some city-specific data and data on political beliefs.
For my purposes, I took the percentages of Americans in the age brackets of our target customers, and averaged them to get a single number. I multiplied that by the number of existing customers that we would be contacting about the new Facebook page. Since the target customers are affluent, I also separately used the figure of 37% and multiplied that by the number of existing customers. The numbers came out in the same ballpark, so I used the median.
Conversion rate for seed followers
Once you know how many of your target customers are on Facebook, you need to determine what percentage you expect will convert through your efforts. This is a number you’ll need to come up with yourself, based on your strategy for getting fans and your knowledge of your customers. Factors to consider, include:
- How many and what channels you’ll use to tell people about your new Facebook page, and the traffic from these various channels
- What incentives, such as contests or special offers, you’ll use to get people to follow you
- The general loyalty and interest your existing customers or leads have in your company, which might cause them to be more willing to follow your page
- Historical data and traditional statistics regarding your conversion rates, particularly if you are trying to convert leads rather than existing customers into page followers
One statistic I found that may be relevant here: embedded badges had a conversion rate of 20.5%. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007434 )
At this point, you can multiply the conversion rate you’ve come up with by the number of your customers on Facebook, to get an estimate of the number of seed fans you’ll get for your page.
Total_target_customers * %_on_Facebook = potential_seed_followers
conversion_rate * potential_seed_followers = seed_followers
Estimate the number of new fans acquired inside Facebook
Next, you need to determine how many fans you’ll acquire for your page, after you’ve launched and seeded it. The hope is that these new fans will be primarily driven by existing followers of your page sharing info from it, or by others seeing posts from your page on their walls. You may also acquire followers over time from badges on your website, newsletter, etc., and ads on Facebook.
Let’s start with the easiest items.
Facebook Ads
You can create a targeted ad on Facebook advertising your new page. Of course, it costs money. I wasn’t able to find a lot of information about conversion rates for these kinds of ads. One source (http://www.mikemccready.ca/blog/2010/03/facebook-ads-can-work-sometimes/) had about a 27% click-rate (clicks on the ads) and a 10%-30% conversion rate (of the people who clicked on the ads, 10%-30% become fans of the page). Another (http://www.startupcoach.org/marketing/advertising/anatomy-of-a-facebook-advertising-campaign/) reported a CTR of 1.14% and a conversion rate of 61%. I have a Parenting and Social Media page, which isn’t a business page, and my own CTR is about 27% with an estimated 55% conversion rate.
You’ll need to review Facebook’s targeting options and consider the appeal of your page to that audience, as well as how much you’re willing to spend. When you set up the ad, Facebook will estimate the number of impressions and clicks you’ll get per day. Pick a CTR and conversion rate and use them to estimate how many fans your ad will bring in.
Badges External to Facebook
You can add badges (Like buttons for your Facebook page) to pages on your website, include it on your blog, put them in your emails and newsletters, etc. Again, you’ll need to know where you plan to put badges, what kind of traffic you get weekly or monthly through those sources, and determine a conversion rate. The conversion rate is based on similar factors to those I covered for seed followers.
Use the same period for each source (monthly or weekly traffic) and then multiply the traffic numbers for each source by your expected conversion rate. You may have different conversion rates for different sources. For example, a landing page targeted at new visitors may have a lower conversion rate than the badge you include in a newsletter sent to existing customers.
Add the numbers from each source to get an idea of the weekly or monthly followers you expect to gain from badges external to Facebook.
Sharing
Lastly, you need to estimate how many people will become a follower of your page because they saw or were sent information about your page. That might be a current fan of your page suggesting that a friend become a fan. It might be a fan of your page who liked something you posted, and shared it with friends on Facebook or elsewhere.
It’s a linear process from sharing to becoming a follower of your page. Each step has to happen and lead to the next, and there’s drop-off along the way:
- A current follower sees your post
- The follower clicks the post to read it (assuming that most are links of some kind)
- The follower shares the post
- The recipient clicks on the shared post
- The recipient decides to also become a fan of your page
Here’s the approach I used:
1. How many people will see your posts?
Estimate the percent of fans that will see your fan page posts each week. Obviously, the more frequently you post, the better chance of your followers seeing something from you. On the other hand, posting too frequently can be annoying. Ideally, you’re posting at least once a day. There are also a lot of variables to consider, such as how full a given user’s feed is. The more packed it is, the less likely they will be to see something from you. It’s hard to estimate how likely users are to see your post.
In this analysis, social media firm Virtue assumed that 1/12th of their followers were on Facebook at any given time that they are posting to their fan page. Facebook claims that 50% of its active users are on Facebook each day. From my study, another 20% of users will check their page at least once a week.
1/12th seems low to me. If you’re posting at least once daily, and you have at least 100 followers exhibiting typical usage patterns, I think it’s reasonable to assume that 20% of them will see your post each day. But if you want to be conservative, use the 8% number. Multiply that number by seven to get a weekly number of views.
(seed_followers X 20%) * 7 = #_ppl_viewing_posts_weekly
2. How many people will click to view your posts?
A lot of your posts will be links to external articles, etc. You need to estimate the percentage of people who will actually click the links. That’s going to vary greatly depending upon the content and the individuals.
What percentage of users who see a post will click to view it? I found two data points, from different studies by the same company:
- Between 2.67% (weekends) to 9.89% (http://onehalfamazing.com/social-media/the-best-time-to-post-to-your-facebook-fan-page/)
- Between 2.12% and 6.49% (http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=138442)
5% seems like a safe average, as Virtue’s study shows much higher rates during weekdays.
#_ppl_viewing_posts_weekly X 5% = #_ppl_clicking_post
3. How many people will share your posts?
Dan Zarrella’s excellent report on sharing does a deep dive into individual sharing (sending to select individuals such as through Facebook email) and group sharing (such as posting on your wall or sharing to Everyone). Here’s the relevant information I extracted for Facebook:
Individual sharing:
- ~35% share once a week
- ~28% share once a day
- ~22% share more than once a day
- 5% share to more than 50 people
- 10% to 10-50 people
Group sharing:
- ~20% will share once a week
- ~15% once a day
- ~25% more than once a day
- 23% will share to 10-50 people
- 14% to 50-100 people
- 15% to 100-500 people
- 7% to 500+
Of course, the question is what percentage will share your posts each day. Based on this data, with knowledge about the kind of information we would be sharing, and taking a big stab in the dark, I assumed that:
- Per week, an average of 5% of users would share a post individually, to an average of 10 people.
- Per week, an average of 10% of users would share a post to multiple people (Everyone), to an average of 100 people.
(#_ppl_clicking_post X 5%) X 10 = #_indiv_share_recipients
(#_ppl_clicking_post X 10%) X 100 = #_group_share_recipients
4. How many people will click the shared post?
For this number, I used this relevant statistic from Social Media Examiner: 25% of Facebook user who receive a shared link click on it. (40% of Twitter users do so.)
I believe that content shared individually (sent to specific people) will have a higher click-through rate. So, I’m using 50% for individually shared posts.
#_indiv_share_recipients X 50% = #_indiv_recipients_click_through
#_group_share_recipients X 25% = #_group_recipients_click_through
5. How many people will become fans, via the shared post?
Now, you have an idea of how many people will be exposed to your page via social sharing on Facebook. Not everyone who views the page will become a follower, though. I used this number, 3.2%, from this study, which showed the following conversion rates from shared items:
Email : 36.8%
Embedded Badges : 20.5%
Personal Links : 8.9%
Facebook : 3.2%
Twitter : 0.4%
A lot of factors affect the likelihood of people becoming fans, so you’ll have to adjust that base number according to what you know about your Facebook landing page quality and call to action, the types of people you’re targeting, the appeal of your content/product, and so on. I used 3.2%.
(#_indiv_recipients_click_through X 3.2%) + (#_group_recipients_click_through X 3.2% ) = weekly_fans_acquired_via_sharing
Putting it all together
Now, to get an idea of expected, weekly fan growth for your page, add all the numbers together:
qeekly_follows_through_ads + weekly_follows_through_badges + weekly_fans_acquired_via_sharing = total_new_follows_weekly
Obviously, you can multiply that number by a specific number of weeks to estimate fan count over a given time period.
What about business conversions?
If the goal of your Facebook page is to convert fans in some way, you’ll need to have a clear definition of conversion. A conversion could be getting people to go to your website and register, or getting them to buy something from the website, or click on something on the Facebook page itself. Whatever conversion means to you, the final step is to estimate the number of people who will convert. Only you can provide that number, for example using historical data from other channels to get a percentage. Multiply that percentage times your expected follows each week:
50% (or your adjusted conversion rate) X total_new_follows_weekly = conversions
Clearly, there’s plenty of wiggle room in these formulas and a lot of differing data of differing importance to the outcome. However, estimating the fan growth rate and the conversion rate gives you some idea of what to expect, and a number to measure against as you conduct your social media campaign through your Facebook page. This is how I did it. How would you do estimate fan growth? What would you change?
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