How Many Facebook Fans Do You Need to Make Money?

How Many Facebook Fans Do You Need to Make Money?

In order to make money from someone on Facebook, you need to get them from their position of doing nothing on Facebook but reading through posts and sharing cat pictures, all the way to your shopping cart, where they can buy something from your business. This is a long, difficult process with a lot of attrition every step of the way.

Zarella’s Hierarchy

There is a theory, created by Dan Zarella, that attempts to model the viral potential of a piece of content on Facebook. I find that it works well to help you calculate the number of fans necessary to make money from your Facebook account.

In order to put this theory to use, you need some ongoing data from your Facebook page. If you’re new to Facebook, or you’re making estimates as to how many users you’ll need to accumulate before you see returns, you’re going to be disappointed. Without actual, factual numbers, you won’t be able to make accurate estimates.

This hierarchy is an inverse pyramid of decreasing numbers, representing the drop-off of users each step of the way. You’ll understand once it’s all explained. Also, Zarella’s Hierarchy deals with shares, rather than conversions, so it’s not a perfect analogue.

Try out this thought experiment. Your Facebook page has 10,000 people following it. That’s not an insignificant audience, but with Facebook’s hundreds of millions of daily users, it’s a drop in a bucket. You can assume 10,000 is a reasonably attainable number.

You want your content to be shared. You post a piece of content. This content is available to 100% of the people following your page. Anyone visiting your page can see it. This is NOT the same as reach! Reach is the next step. The “Exposure” of your content is 100%, therefore 10,000 people.

Next, you need to get the attention of your users. This, on Facebook, is your reach. Reach on Facebook is just Facebook’s calculation of how many people actually saw your post. Typical average reach is around 6%. This means out of your audience of 10,000, approximately 600 people will actually see your post. That’s the number of people whose attention you get, even for a moment.

Now you need to motivate those people to actually take action with your post. In this case, you’re trying to earn a share. The average engagement rate of a Facebook post is around 1%. This means of the 600 people who saw your post, 6 of them will engage with it. The distribution of this engagement across clicks, likes and shares will vary depending on the post.

Monetary Calculations

For the main topic of this post, we’re considering Zarella’s Hierarchy to be accurate, but we’re taking it one step further. We’re also simplifying it slightly. First, assume that all engagement is a click through. This allows us to assume that the motivation phase is equal to your click-through rate. It’s also likely close to the truth; not many people are going to like or share your post without clicking it.

To take it one step further, we need to measure one off-site metric; the conversion rate of your Facebook visitors. With the 10,000 users, 6 clicks example above, you need to track those 6 people on your site and determine how many of them will convert. Thankfully, you can track this information directly using Facebook’s conversion pixel.

Consider the simplest possible definition of making money from Facebook. One conversion is all it takes. Assuming you’re using Facebook for free, with no investment other than time, one single conversion is a positive ROI. Let’s work backwards.

You need one conversion. Assume your conversion rate is on the high end, at 10%. This will vary by industry and by advertising method, and won’t be accurate for your Facebook page, which is why you’ll need to plug in your own data. More on that later.

A 10% conversion rate means that 1 out of 10 visitors will convert. Therefore, to earn one conversion – and thus make money from Facebook – you need 10 people to click through to your site.

Using Zarella’s Hierarchy and working backwards, we then take it up to the motivation/click/engagement step. You need 10 people to click through to your site. With an engagement rate of 1%, to get 10 people to click through, you need 1,000 people to see your post.

Up one more step, to the attention/reach step. Average Facebook reach is, again, about 6%. Therefore, to get 1,000 people to see your post, you need an audience of approximately 16,700 people.

Therefore, to make money from Facebook by the absolute simplest definition, you need – based on average calculations that don’t apply to your business – nearly 17,000 fans.

Applying to the Real World

This is where your data and your calculations come in. You need to measure several metrics.

• Your website conversion rate amongst Facebook referrals. Measure this with the Facebook conversion tracking pixel.


• Your average link post engagement rates. Only measure the engagement rates of the posts you make linking to your website! If you’re measuring engagement on posts that have no chance of earning you money, you’re skewing the numbers.


• Your average reach. Again, only measure the reach of your promotional posts with links to your site.

You also need to determine what, for you, counts as earning money from Facebook. Is it one single conversion? Is it 10 conversions? 100? The precise number needs to be determined as your goal for this exercise.

Now take all of the data and plug it into the formula.

• Take the number of conversions you need to make.


• Divide this number by your conversion rate to determine how many people need to make it to your site.


• Divide that number by your average engagement/click-through rate. This will tell you how many people you need to reach with a given post.


• Divide that number by your reach. This will determine how many people you need to have following your page in order to get your required conversions.

If you’re doing the math properly and your conversion metrics are low, this will result in some depressingly high numbers. You might end up calculating that you need millions of followers in order to make your sales goals from Facebook. This is normal, but a few things alter the calculations.

Increasing Rates and Altering Calculations

There are a few things you can do to make the numbers a lot more in your favor.

• Increase your website conversion rate.


• Increase your Facebook post engagement rate.


• Increase your Facebook reach.

Additionally, you can invest money into Facebook in the form of ads. Ads, with the click-through metric, will guarantee you X number of clicks. You will need to adjust your sales goals to compensate for the expense, but you can also eliminate other portions of the calculation entirely.

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