Measuring beyond fans and feedback rate

Brands have been frantically accumulating fans (or likes) with a hope of increasing their brand value. Businesses have started adapting different ways to attract fans for their brands with the most popular one being the “Like” gate. Incentivizing consumers in exchange for a like with the intent to grow their Facebook presence may seem like a killer move. Sure, it is a great first step to grow the size of your community but that by itself does not indicate your success. Are you better off having 100,000 fans or 1 million fans? What does the number of fans mean to a brand?

The number of fans a brand has is a mere indication of the size of your community, it says very little about the health and the interactions that happen within your community. Monitoring your fan health becomes vital to ensure your fans remain engaged. The question is how you are able to accomplish it. The answer to your question is ----- Fan Health Score (FHS)

Fan Health Score (FHS)x = f(FRx ERx IFx AUx Ux)

where x is the fan page under consideration

Fan health Score (FHS) is a function of 5 different variables that indicate the state of your Facebook community. They are weighted based on the level of importance they hold in deciding your fan health. For example, higher feedback rate will impact your score more than higher impression per fan rate. The explanations of the variables are given below:

FR – Feedback rate: Feedback is the interactions (Likes+comments) you receive per post, the rate of which is computed using the formula (comments + likes)/Impressions.

ER – Facebook edgerank of your page: FB EdgeRank is a complex algorithm of sorts framed by the folks at Facebook to determine newsfeed optimization (who views your wall post and who doesn’t). Thankfully, we have a tool now to determine a brand’s edge rank [1]which makes life that much easier.

IF – Impressions per fan: Impressions per fan is nothing but the measure of fans who actually view your post, which is the total impressions per post divided by the number of fans.

AU – Active users: This indicates the number of people who interacted with or viewed your page or its posts.

U – Unsubscribes: Also referred by Facebook as unlikes, are the number of people who choose to unsubscribe from your page so that your stories will not appear in their Newsfeed in the future.

Now that we have the explanations out of the way, our next step is to identify the variables, plug in those numbers and voila you have your fan health score. The resulting score is a number between 0 – 10.

Fan Health Score (FHS)	Performance indication
0 – 3	Poor
4 -6	Average
7 -10	Good

One thing to keep in mind is that FHS indicates the current state of your fan base based on activity that happens regardless of your current strategy. If your goal is to increase the number of fans, your FHS might be low but if you are in an active engagement mode make sure FHS is at least above 5. The score would help you understand the effectiveness of your strategy and make appropriate changes based on it. Once you have your score and have understood the effectiveness of your strategy, the next step is optimizations to improve your score..... and that is for another day......

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[1] Edgerank calculator is not a Facebook published tool. It is a tool developed by a third party based on Facebook’s algorithm