Markets

The Cost of Facebook: Advertisers Pay $3 Per Mention for Social Media Buzz

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: February 10, 2011 / 4:46 PM EST / MoneyWatch

It costs anywhere between 9 cents and $3.10 for an advertiser to generate a single mention on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites from a Super Bowl ad, according to Alterian, a market research company that's been churning out data on the effectiveness of advertising in the big game (click to enlarge):

The data is interesting if -- like all advertisers -- you want to know how much it costs to generate buzz through blogs, microblogs, "likes" and other digital word-of-mouth. Some studies have suggested that a Facebook "fan" is "worth" $136.38 cents to an advertiser, because fans buy more of the brand they like. Others have calculated they cost just $3.60 if you were to put a price on reaching them as if it were a traditional media buy.

Alterian's data suggests that the $3-per-mention level is the benchmark to beat for advertisers. The group took the total number of mentions of Super Bowl advertisers in the runup to the big game (255,431), factored in the cost of buying 30 seconds ($3 million) and divided one by the other for all the advertisers. I'm not an Excel spreadsheet, but my eyeballs tell me that the average performance is probably around the 50 cents mark.

Unsurprisingly, Volkswagen and Groupon, did best, generating the largest number of mentions and therefore the lowest cost per mention. But the Fox (NWS) and Disney (DIS) movie studios did equally well even though they didn't get as much total social media traction:

Volkswagen's commercial, featuring an adorable kid in a Darth Vader costume, has become a genuine online phenomena. (Can't get enough? Here are the outtakes.) Groupon -- whose ad made fun of the human rights situation in Tibet -- has become a late-night monologue punchline.

The worst performer was CarMax, which got so few mentions it paid $3.10 for each one. Here's its ad:

OK, it's not terrible. But it's not memorable either (even though it's working hard to be). The lesson -- from VW -- seems to be something we already know: A great idea, well-executed, will succeed in any medium.

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Image by Jerkass Clothing