What’s a Facebook fan worth? Syncapse determines true value of Facebook followers

Would you estimate your Facebook fans are worth $240 million to your company?

Probably not, and they probably aren’t. But it appears to be the case for Research in Motion—that’s the approximated value of their Facebook fan base.

It’s a difficult thing to quantify company’s social media and online efforts. Businesses know they need to tap into the digital realm, but can’t really know what’s the most effective way to go about it.

Syncapse is leading the way to finding out. It combines elements of business intelligence software with the ability to manage and track multiple social media accounts. The company wants to stop other companies from “looking at social media as something that’s handled by a few people on the marketing team, to something that is integrated into the backbone of the business,” reads an article in the Financial Post.

“The whole goal is about trying to bring some credibility and some type of organization around social media from a business context,” Kerry Munro, COO of Syncapse, told the paper. “This is a way of integrating social media into the corporate structure.”

Syncapse’s SocialTALK software is used by dozens of companies, including RIM. It’s designed to let organizations publish a message to several sites and communities at once, and streamline the process. To give an example, RIM would be able to upload the same photo of a BlackBerry to multiple blogs and social networking sites, simultaneously, using SocialTALK.

But Syncapse’s software has other uses: it can crunch down data gathered from social media sites, including customers’ purchasing habits, brand loyalties, and their willingness to recommend products to friends, to determine what a Facebook fan is worth to a particular brand.

A recent survey by the company has each BlackBerry fan of Facebook valued at $83.98, valuing the entire fan base at $245-million. But here’s where it’s interesting: across the top 20 brands on Facebook, a fan can be worth anything between $0 and $270.77.

“It’s about understanding a baseline of how you’re performing today and then figuring out what levers across the dashboard you need to pull to amplify performance across your publishing groups, your media groups, your PR and communications,” Kerry said. “We can isolate down to where your performance levels are increasing or decreasing to the point where we can guide someone to say … if the internal communications team isn’t hitting the mark, the community isn’t engaging itself in the conversation.”