POV: Do more 'Number of Fans' indicate the success of a Facebook Brand Page?

Advertisers usually seek more number of fans or users to join them on Facebook.com brand page. Is that the right measure?

Mohit Hira, President, Training.com, NIIT

If marketers don't define goals beyond setting up a Facebook fan page, a plateau will be reached. Consider these metrics:

Comments: If a fan page is dependent on a brand manager to keep comments going, it hasn't got off first base. Active fan engagement among consumers shows there's a conversation happening.

Engagement size: How long or deep are the discussions? Are there new threads?

Time: How much time do they spend? How often?

Consumption: If a brand is uploading films, are they being watched or downloaded?

Content sharing: How viral is your community? Is stuff travelling out into blogs?

Feedback: Shows how much they care.

Anjali Hegde, Co-founder and vice-president, Interactive Avenues

In order to get sustained benefits from Social Media Marketing, businesses need to have a long-term social media strategy that is integrated - and beyond a one-off campaign based approach.

Instead of basic campaign specific metrics such as number of fans on Facebook, it would be more beneficial to look at more critical metrics such as customer retention, satisfaction rates, brand recall, profits and even sales.

Social Media measurement needs to use the two filters of accuracy (exact number of fans, comments, sharing content and interactions) and attribution (much like TV advertising or PR is measured with some results attributed to the TVC or PR as a hindsight: factors like brand recall or brand favourability).

Karthik S, Head, Digital Strategy, Edelman India

Many Indian brands are touting their community (mostly Facebook) URLs in mainstream print ads. But there's precious little worth in this, given the low percentage of internet users. A better metric, perhaps, is the number of members/fans who have participated. For instance, if 80 per cent of a community of even 100 members have commented at least twice in the past week, that would be a tremendously encouraging online community for the brand.

This metric would be pertinent for low-involvement brands since the nature of the category doesn't contain enough to warrant an effort to comment or participate. Examples include chewing gum and toothpaste.

Ajaay Gupta, CMD, Capital Foods

The metrics to measure the effectiveness of Facebook brand page would be: Traffic - page views generated on the fan page. Fans - number and quality of people reached, endorsement of the brand. Interaction - number of users who have clicked and moved beyond opportunity-to-see and paid attention. Sales - special offers only for Facebook fans. Leads - distributorship inquiries. Public relations - fans could include journalists and media owners. Customer engagement - shows that the customer is paying attention to the brand.

Still, the number-of-fans metric is a critical one. The average person's newsfeed reaches 164 friends on Facebook. So each time a Facebook user engages with a brand, 164 people have the opportunity to also become a fan and learn more about that company.

(Capital Foods owns Ching's Secret and has 1.01 lakh fans on Facebook)

* Facebook has recently changed the terminology of 'Fans' to 'Like' for Facebook brand page, where 'Become a fan' button will be a 'Like' button from now onwards.

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