Social media are all the rage in marketing, but should they be? Sure, Facebook
is growing fastit had more than 350 million accounts late last year, 50 million
of which were added in the fall alone. But how much do businesses really
influence consumers when they launch pages on the site to attract fans and to
pepper them with messages and offers?
To begin to answer that question, we did the obvious: We set up one company’s
Facebook page and measured the effect on customer behavior. Our partner in this
experiment was Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based bakery and caf
chain.
We began by e-mailing a survey to 13,270 customers from DG’s mailing list to
gather store evaluations and data on shopping behavior; 689 people responded.
Then, we launched the Facebook page and invited everyone on the mailing list to
become a fan. DG updated its page several times a week with pictures of goodies,
news about contests and promotions, links to favorable reviews, and
introductions to DG employees. Three months later, we resurveyed customers, this
time receiving 1,067 responses from DG’s Facebook fans, Facebook users who did
not become fans, and customers not on Facebook. We analyzed the data sets
separately and then compared participants in the first survey with those in the
second who had become DG fans.
To read the rest of this story please go to:
Harvard Business Review
