How Much is a Tweet or a Like Worth to You?

ChompOn has released some interesting findings (pdf) related to social media sharing and its value to e-commerce. Specifically, the firm sought out to answer the question: "What is the value of a social action in online commerce?"

What they came up with is that a Facebook Share was worth $14, a Facebook "like" was worth $8, a tweet was worth $5, and a Twitter follow was worth $2.

"Admittedly, we believe the true value for likes and follows to be much higher due to creation of long-term loyalty," says ChompOn. "Additionally, it is not possible to directly attribute traffic from these actions so it was necessary to estimate.

Obviously, you have to take into account their methodology, which is where that estimation factor comes in.

"For shares and tweets, we were able to directly attribute sales to the original action, so we simply took the total revenue attributed to each action and divided it by the total number of shares/tweets," the firm says. "For likes and follows, we had to estimate attribution by looking at our traffic references and subtracting out purchases made through shares/tweets as well as purchases made through direct traffic."

ChompOn is also careful to point out that gross revenue depends on the products and services being offered.

In reality, you may find a greater dollar value in all of these social interactions, or you may find now dollar value at all. There are a lot of potential variables to consider, but if nothing else, it shows that you can indeed place a dollar value on a tweet, on a "like", etc.

That’s really the moral of the story. Many complaints have been voiced about a lack of measurable ROI when it comes to social media. If you have this complaint, it may be time to re-evaluate your measuring strategies.

There are 3 Comments. Add Yours.

Ranjeet
February 19, 2011 at 4:32 am

It is quite often that people are often struck with one or the other hardware or networking problems when they are working on computer or laptop. No matter the computer usage is for professional or personal purposes, problems are bound to hit the machines. Particularly organizations and businesses are in need to have adept computer hardworking and networking solutions
STR82U
February 19, 2011 at 12:32 pm

A better question for marketers is “How much is the space of a social icon on your site worth to you?”

I was re reading two articles about a social affiliate program idea that suggests “Following” and “Liking” could be a valuable new affiliate program; Placing the advertisers social icons near articles or something else about that brand to encourage promoting that one “page” from an average user’s website. An article here at WPN, “twitter-favored-by-consumers”>Brands on Facebook and Twitter are favored by consumers” showed people had more loyalty toward products that they publicly showed a preference for (endorsed) on social sites.

I think it’ll be a matter of time before icons become advertisments.
Roy @ Work from Home
February 21, 2011 at 3:37 am

What makes it difficult to measure is the source of the social action. I fan or follower can be bought for a couple of cents, but has very little value compared to a like by an interested reader on a blog post.