However as businesses attach a commercial value to their mailing and email lists, as a corporate asset, I thought it would still be interesting to look at what might be the value of a social media following.
While it may not be legal to sell such an asset, it can contain value in providing a cheap way to reach part of your audience quickly and conveniently. In fact, I have railed before about organisations who pour money into building a social media following for a campaign, then throw their investment away by closing it down or neglecting it – just as they are used to doing in traditional media when renting eyeballs.
So as a starting point for calculations of social media value I put together a little spreadsheet on Google to allow you to calculate a value based on several key social media networks and blogs. It uses research figures that have been calculated to average out the value of an individual follower or fan.
Just plug in your numbers in the boxes provided and see what you get.
Feel free to extend the spreadsheet as well.
eGov AU
Craig Thomler’s personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
Unfortunately I seem to be unable to edit any of the cells, and I’d really like to test it out. There’s also people who sell followers for Twitter, in which case those followers 99% odds have zero ROI. The only possible value assigned to those types of followers is encouraging others to follow you as well.
Try this link instead: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdHh0dDZ4MGNic1RVSEtRLWNaXzdMNFE
Wow, very cool. How did you come up with how much a follower/friend/connection is worth? Also, who do I call to start collecting that 100K salary I’m earning?