Do Facebook fan pages really work?

Do Facebook fan pages really work?

Exchange student: Chen, Szu-Jui

Backgrounds:

  In recent years, more and more companies are rushing to try and jump into social media because they feel tremendous pressure to prevent being left behind. And most of marketers in corporate consider social media like Facebook or Twitter will be the next star channel for them to build the relationship with their target customers.

  However, there are more discussions about the utility for corporate to maintain some fan pages on these social media platform. Some people claimed that creating a fan page on Facebook is useless because the marketers cannot efficiently communicate with their target customers properly through it, and the main reasons are as follows:

(1)You don’t know WHY you need a fan page

(2)You don’t know HOW you are going to use Facebook to advance the mission

(3)You don’t know WHO you are reaching on Facebook

(4)You don’t know WHAT value you will provide to your fans

(5)You don’t know WHEN you audience is on Facebook

(6)You don’t know WHERE your audience is

Resource:http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/6-reasons-not-to-create-a-facebook-fan-page/

Focus question:

  Therefore, through properly social network analysis, we can try to find out if it is true that operating a fan page on Facebook is not able to fulfil these missions.

Data Needed:

  Based on personal profile and the internet IP tracking information, marketer can get or monitor the information that every user surfing on Facebook.

(1) Personal profile of each user who liked the fan page

-  Age, Gender

-  Occupation

-  Nationality

-  Numbers of friends on Facebook

-  Relations

-  Numbers of fan page they liked

-  Interests

(2)Posts on Facebook fan page

-  Connections between users (Responses for posts)

-  How many posts from users

-  How many posts from marketers

-  Relationships between users (As friends or not)

(3)IP tracking

-  Time they surfing on Facebook

-  Time they browsing the fan page

-  How long they stay on fan page

Implement:

  Use the data collected from Facebook to analyze the social network on the specific fan page. For example, we can compare two fan pages. One has more than 56 million fans like it, for instance, Coca cola fan page on Facebook. On the other hand, another fan page could be 0.8 million fans liked it which could be Uniqlo fan page.

  After selecting the target fan page we are monitoring, we can start to collect the data, and then classify the data to analyze. Based on these data, we maybe can figure out some answers as follows:

(1)Opinion leader on the fan page (One with most connections)

(2)When is the peak time for users on fan page

(3)Density of connections between users on the fan page

(4)Set up the practical profile about your uses on the fan page

(5)Average time they spend on fan page

  Digging out these results, we can draw some conclusions to answer the questions just mentioned at first, like WHO, WHEN, WHERE, HOW…etc. Hence, It might be useful for enterprises to measure if maintaining a fan page on Facebook do  bring some value for the corporate itself or it just waste resources.