Brand Facebook Pages May Be More Popular than Believed

Estimating how effective social marketing is is less of a science than most may want or believe but there is a clear need to quantify the effect of this type of promotion. A social media consultancy startup, Vitrue, has come up with some actual numbers to help brands that have a Facebook presence. It estimates that click-through rates for the entries on a brand Facebook Page's wall are as much as 6.49 percent, according to a report by Ad Age.

Vitrue recently introduced a new suite of tools for brands wanting to manage their social media presence, offering a way to measure click-through rates for the links to posts and newsfeeds. Hard numbers are close to impossible to come by so the company had to do a bit of estimating to come up with how many users are exposed to the links in the first place. Because the links may be distributed on other sites besides Facebook, it's hard to know how many users view them.

The researchers also had to take into account the fact that users don't necessarily visit the social network every day, all day. The number of fans a Facebook Page has doesn't directly translate into the number of views either as, again, they may not visit the site on a daily basis. So the company estimated that one twelfth of Facebook's total audience was on the site at any one point to come up with the click-through rates.

At one twelfth of the audience the typical click-through rate for a Facebook Page post was 6.49 percent. The numbers dropped for higher audiences; if one eight of the users are visiting the site the click-through rate drops to 4.32 percent while at one fourth it drops further to 2.12 percent. Vitrue based its estimates on Quantcast numbers for June, which showed 90.8 million unique visitors in the US, totaling 2.9 billion visits. ComScore numbers for July show only 87.7 million unique visitors in the US.