Inside Facebook

Those interested in playing the Facebook Page market have been moving more actively in recent days since we reported that OraBrush, a company that makes tongue cleaners for curing bad breath, announced that it had outbid Hershey’s for the Kisses page and its 1.1 million Facebook fans for an undisclosed sum. So, what’s the going rate on Facebook Pages these days?

Because the marketplace is not very liquid – it’s not always easy to contact the owner of a Facebook Page – data points are few. However, most of the transactions we’re hearing about are pegging Facebook Pages at less than US $0.01/fan. In other words, even the biggest Page transactions are still only in the order of US $10,000′s.

Many buyers are thinking about the fan relationship as an annuity on future ad impressions in the Facebook stream. For example, a Page with 1,000,000 fans could publish status updates many times per day, which could generate many hundreds of thousands of impressions daily.

Depending on the call to action, significant sales could be generated as well. For example, OraBrush is driving Facebook fans of the Kisses page to its e-commerce website, where it sells breath strips:

At the same time, publishing too spammy updates could lead fans to leave the Page, or at least block it from the stream. So for every update that generates sales, Page administrators would be causing attrition amongst their fan base as well.

For now, Facebook still has yet to announce a policy on public profile transactions. However, since the whole idea behind Pages was to create a vehicle for brands and businesses to have an official presence inside Facebook around which to base their marketing efforts, Facebook is likely to curtail generic public profile spam in the long run. Facebook wants Pages to be authentic channels for brands and authorized agents, leaving generic concepts to Facebook Groups, which don’t have stream access.

So, how much is a Facebook fan worth to you?