Do people who like your Facebook page also buy?

Are Facebook "Likes" and for that matter Twitter "Followers" a metric of success?

It is a question that is interesting many companies as more effort and resource is put into social media. It is flattering of course for people to take time out to click a "Like" button. Hardly a demanding or onerous task to show such affection for your brand, but what does it do in terms of boosting enquiries and sales?

By clicking "Like" you are given their permission to enter their newsfeed and  updates the 'killer app' of Facebook. If their friends notice they have liked your brand, then they might take a look out of curiosity themselves, so you could reach new people as personal recommendation is always a strong card. If in addition they add a comment, then this demonstrates some engagement which is a step towards actually being interested in your company.  Facebook users it seems pay attention to their newsfeed, but it is claimed that the majority of people who "like" a page never return to it. But no worries, you can now push them messages via their newsfeed. Except they can just as easily revoke that permission if they tire of what you send them. Then there's Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm which filters the news they receive and one measure is the affinity or  interaction you have with that person. Because if they are a real friend it will be a two way communication process and news from friends is rated highly. That's why they use Facebook in the first place. Of course someone may have "liked" you because off an offer, free voucher or competition entry and not be within the scope of your target market at all - in other words are they prospects you actually want to be engaged with in conversation.

As a straw poll piece of research we looked how many "likes" companies had in a niche b-2-b market sector. Taking just a small sample of 10 prominent companies in this sample market, 2 did not appear to have a Facebook page at all, the biggest company had zero "likes", 3 companies showed a few hundred and 4 companies a few thousand. Of course it is early days and the unliked big boys might find themselves overtaken by the liked competitors, time will tell.