The Monetary Value Of A Social Following [Infographic]

How do you value your social media following? Some people say the ROI can’t be measured, or it shouldn’t be measured. The question is, why shouldn’t it be measured? Is it not in the numbers of your following, and the value therein that you will find the true worth of your marketing investments? In order to gain a better overview of what a social following is worth, I took a look at an infographic that might shed some much needed light on this.

The valuation of a social following has always been available, but it’s always been a tricky business. How do you really put a dollar value on something that can’t stay static, if you know what I mean. You can put an estimated value on it, but it will always fluctuate since your following is never constant – meaning none of your followers or fans are going to be constant in their following, interaction or even visibility. I think we can all admit that trying to put a dollar value on a social following is quite a problematic endeavor, but we are definitely still going to try.

With the help of an infographic called The Value Of A Social Following, presented by Imbue Marketing (design by ajrdesign), we are going to take a closer look at the monetary value of a social following. The value of a social share is quite precisely stated in this infographic, and I am sure this will somewhat spur an argument concerning what it is based on. What we can definitely derive from this infographic (even though it doesn’t state what these numbers are based on), is that a Facebook share is worth almost three times as much as a Twitter retweet. This of course has to do with the average percentage of actual interactions out of the total number of your following.

On Twitter, the return on your actions is far less than on Facebook. When it comes to the social following itself, we can clearly see that Facebook has it down, while Twitter seems to struggle with its interaction level. Facebook has a Like value of around $8.00, while Twitter followers are only worth around $2.00.

You can of course apply this to your own social following and derive the total monetary value of it. However, I would suggest not taking that value too seriously since the constant of your following differs heavily since people don’t seem to use Twitter to the same extent as they use Facebook. The addiction may very well be the same, but the features and the visibility on Facebook seem to be far greater than that of Twitter. This makes Twitter lose out a little on its actual marketing value.

As I said, don’t take these values too seriously since they are just estimations without any factual presentation. The actual value of your social following is no more than your ability to get it to interact and take action based on the content you share. It’s really as simple as that.