Most companies today realize the importance of having an active presence on Facebook as it offers many exceptional, low cost marketing opportunities for businesses of all sizes. However, the question that Facebook hesitant businesses, as well as Facebook active companies for that matter, may be asking is how often do Facebook likes translate into actual sales? Recently, Alchemy Social, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, completed a study linking Facebook fans and how likely they are to actually visit the business’ online store.
To complete this study, Alchemy Social tracked three different groups of people: fans who were avidly engaged in the company’s Facebook page, non-active fans, and those Facebook users who were not active fans of the company. These Facebook users were tracked through ads on the company’s Facebook page to see how often they visited the company’s online store.
After completion, not surprisingly it was found that Facebook fans were more likely to visit the online store of that business. The results overwhelmingly show how important it is to get Facebook likes, and for a business to continue to have traffic on its Facebook page. Here’s what was discovered:
- Facebook users who interacted with the business’ ads were 20 times more likely to visit the company’s online store than those who did not click on the advertisements.
- People on Facebook who did not interact with the ads were four times more likely to visit the online store than those people who were not Facebook users themselves.
- Facebook fans of the business made 131 percent more visits to the online store than active Facebook users who were not fans of the company.
- Fans of the company made 639 percent more visits to the online store than non-Facebook users.
- Once Facebook users became actual fans of the business, they visited its website at a 30 percent higher rate than before they liked the business on Facebook.
- Alchemy calculated the return of investment on the fans acquired while running the company’s Facebook campaign at 1,292 percent.
Overall, this study clearly shows that the benefits of a business being active on Facebook are outstanding and easily pay for themselves. Alchemy goes on to recommend that a company’s goal should be to engage with its Facebook fan base in many different facets, there are many different tools that can be used to market the business. Ultimately, what it comes down to is giving its Facebook fans a reason to continue to visit the page, which has shown will increase the amount of hits on the company’s online store, thus increasing overall sales.
