Value of sharing on Facebook

Howard Lake | 20 April 2011 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Digital
• Facebook
• Research and statistics

What is the value of someone sharing a link on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites? Here’s an infographic that gives some more information around this useful but sometimes elusive metric.

And rather than simply present a pretty infographic, you can read at Calculating the Value of a Review Shared on Facebook how that figure was arrived at. That post reminds us that Ticketmaster has, like Eventbrite, has shared details on the value of a share: “every time a user posted in their newsfeed that they bought a ticket from Ticketmaster, friends spent an additional $5.30 on Ticketmaster (presumably for the same event)”.

Have you managed to calculate the value of a ‘share’ on Facebook or other sites? It would seem to be a valuable metric, but equally one that depends on so many factors. What are you ‘selling’ or asking for? How large is your audience? What kind of people follow you? Can you, or should you, compare ‘product reviews’ shared on Facebook for commercial products with those for donations to charity? Probably not.

There’s a very good conversation on this issue underway on Quora right now which raises some of these issues:

www.quora.com/What-is-the-commerce-value-of-a-Share-on-Facebook-E-Mail-LinkedIn-and-Twitter

• HostelBookers to donate £10,000 by public vote (2 June 2011)
  
• Packyourbags Holidays runs Facebook 'like' donation campaign for Plan International (31 October 2011)
  
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.