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Rice University Research Tallies Facebook Fan Page Results

March 10, 2010 By Heather Fletcher
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Facebook already provides its own advertising case studies. But one about fan pages, researched by Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, is getting a good deal of attention.

David Ruth, a university spokesman, says he's gotten a lot of calls from marketers requesting the full study from Utpal Dholakia, an associate professor of management.

Dholakia says the full study, titled "How Effective Is Facebook Marketing?" is due out at the end of May. He'll be its primary author, but there'll be input from others who have helped him with the research. One of the secondary authors will be Emily Durham, a university alumna and founder of Houston-based restaurant consultancy Restaurant Connections.

In the meantime, Durham and Dholakia co-authored a sneak peek at a snippet of the research: an article in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review titled "One Cafe Chain's Facebook Experiment."

While a few of the findings are brand-related, some of the already reported information also applies to direct marketers. At the beginning of a customer research effort, 689 customers responded to a survey e-mailed to 13,270 customers of Dessert Gallery, a Houston-based bakery and cafe chain. Three months later, 1,067 of those on Dessert Gallery's Facebook fan page answered the survey.

Here's what the 1,756-respondent survey found about the impact of Dessert Gallery's Facebook fan page, which contained weekly updates about menu items, contests and promotions, links to reviews, and introductions to employees:

  • Fans made 36 percent more visits to the stores each month than did regular customers, spending 45 percent more of their eating out dollars there and 33 percent more than regular customers did.
  • About 5 percent of Dessert Gallery's customers became fans, which Dholakia says may indicate that fan pages work best as niche marketing tools.
  • The e-mail list yielded 283 fan page sign-ups in three months, or 2.1 percent of those on Dessert Gallery's 13,270-customer e-mail database.
"Social media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs," Dholakia says in the study announcement.


 
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Most Recent Comments:
Rebecca - Posted on March 10, 2010
I have a fan page on Facebook (for Purify Your Body). I think that you can't accurately say that ALL the fans are from the email distribution list. If you are familiar with Facebook, you know that in the newsfeeds it shows the pages that your friends just became a fan of. I have "fanned" more pages that way vs. direct invites.

Another thing is that I get most of my email while I am at work (most of my waking time is spent at work, and I am in front of the computer the whole day). And I do not access Facebook at work, it is blocked by our firewall.

So, if I get an email inviting me to do anything with FB, I do not do it. I can't. I am sure many other folks have the same issues (this is even with my personal email account). I delete the emails that don't pertain to me right then and there, or I forget about them.

It would be wise to mention the viral aspect of it... once it is on the newsfeed of a particular person who has 800 friends... all 800 of those friends have access to see and join the page that their friend thought was pertinent enough to join/fan.

Saying "The e-mail list yielded 283 fan page sign-ups in three months, or 2.1 percent of those on Dessert Gallery's 13,270-customer e-mail database" is a fallacy... unless just comparing numbers... but I would guess it would be wrong if they actually thought all 283 came from the email.
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Archived Comments:
Rebecca - Posted on March 10, 2010
I have a fan page on Facebook (for Purify Your Body). I think that you can't accurately say that ALL the fans are from the email distribution list. If you are familiar with Facebook, you know that in the newsfeeds it shows the pages that your friends just became a fan of. I have "fanned" more pages that way vs. direct invites.

Another thing is that I get most of my email while I am at work (most of my waking time is spent at work, and I am in front of the computer the whole day). And I do not access Facebook at work, it is blocked by our firewall.

So, if I get an email inviting me to do anything with FB, I do not do it. I can't. I am sure many other folks have the same issues (this is even with my personal email account). I delete the emails that don't pertain to me right then and there, or I forget about them.

It would be wise to mention the viral aspect of it... once it is on the newsfeed of a particular person who has 800 friends... all 800 of those friends have access to see and join the page that their friend thought was pertinent enough to join/fan.

Saying "The e-mail list yielded 283 fan page sign-ups in three months, or 2.1 percent of those on Dessert Gallery's 13,270-customer e-mail database" is a fallacy... unless just comparing numbers... but I would guess it would be wrong if they actually thought all 283 came from the email.