Reineke Reitsma
It’s already been four years since my colleague Josh Bernoff published the book Groundswell, in which he discusses how organisations can harness the power of social media. Since then, there have been many heated debates at Forrester about how companies can measure the value that social media brings to their organisation — and whether they should even do so. But we’ve heard the voices of market insights professionals loud and clear: They want guidance on how to show how the role of being a Facebook fan is related to their customers’ purchasing behaviours. My colleague Gina Sverdlov has conducted a survey for a number of brands and has run a logistic regression analysis to understand this relationship. We call it the “Facebook factor,” and Gina explains how it works in the following blog post.
We proudly present “The Facebook Factor”: Forrester’s Facebook impact model quantifies the impact of a Facebook fan.
Gina Sverlov
We listened to marketers of the world’s biggest brands when they asked, “What’s the impact of Facebook on my brand?” and we decided to take a look for ourselves. We proudly present our latest research, “The Facebook Factor.” In the report, we answer the pressing question, “How much more likely are Facebook fans to purchase, consider, and recommend brands, compared with non-fans?” We used logistic regression modeling to find out. The impact? We call it the “Facebook factor,” and I urge you to read the report to find out how you can leverage our methodology to assess the Facebook factor for your brand.
In the report, we use four major brands as case studies to assess the Facebook factor for Coca-Cola, Walmart, Best Buy, and BlackBerry(Research In Motion [RIM]). Guess what? Facebook fans are much more likely to purchase, consider, and recommend the brands that they engage with on Facebook than non-fans. As the graphic below shows, Facebook fans of Best Buy are about twice as likely to purchase from and recommend Best Buy as non-fans.
And we didn’t just examine the impact of Facebook fans in a silo. We compared the impact of engaging with these brands on Facebook with the impact of other driving factors of brand engagement on these metrics. For example, being a Facebook fan has almost double the impact on purchasing from Walmart as having a Walmart near a consumer’s home.
So what does this mean for companies? The fact that Facebook fans are more likely to buy (and spend more on), consider, and recommend the brands they engage with on Facebook shows that the purchase process is not a dead-end road. Brand engagement is a driver of loyalty and purchase for companies, and Facebook is a great channel for advocates to share brand experiences with others. Read the full report to find out more about what this means for your organisation.
Interested in finding out more or having Forrester assess the Facebook factor for your brand? Please contact me for more information.
Reineke Reitsma is VP & Research Director at Forrester Research and oversees the research conducted by Forrester for Market Insights Professionals globally. On a regular basis she will present a blog post by one of the analysts on her team or herself here on a RW Connect. For more posts by Forrester’s MI analysts see: http://blogs.forrester.com/market_insights.
