Online retailers know how tough the Facebook game can be: how much are we really getting out of all those new “Likes” anyway?

It’s difficult to know how much time to allocate to your Facebook strategy when you can’t answer that question. Ecwid has released some data about how to better qualify and quantify a Facebook “Like.”

Ecwid’s wanted to know whether a correlation between a like and a sale could really be made, especially since the company provides retailers with a store-building app for Facebook.

In the study, the company compiled stats from the last 12 months on cumulative sales orders placed within its Facebook store application by all of the 40,000+ Ecwid-powered Facebook storefronts. The company then divided the total number of Facebook likes into the total sales dollars from Facebook-based stores. Ecwid sellers are generally small or medium sized businesses (SMBs) or individuals.

From their analysis, here are some highlights of what the Ecwid team found:

– One page Like equates to an average value of $0.21 in sales per year, on average, for all Facebook storefronts
– One page Like among the top 10% (in sales volume) of Facebook stores, equates to an average of $1.20 in sales per year
– For the Top 1% (in sales volume) of Facebook stores, one page Like equates to an average value of $21.49 in sales per year.

That means there is a six-fold difference in value between all the stores and the top 10% of stores, and a 100-fold difference with the Top 1%.

So what are the top 1% and top 10% doing right that the rest of the Facebook stores can’t seem to grasp? That’s what we now want to find out.

The study also wanted to uncover whether having lots of Likes equated to more compounded sales. They found that:

– For the top 25% of Facebook stores with the most Likes, one page Like equates to an average value of $0.13 in sales per year.
– For the top 5% of Facebook stores with the most Likes, one page LIKE equates to an average value of $0.01 in sales per year.

This was a contrast to the previous data, which seemed to suggest that the top sales volume performers had more valuable Likes; a point which was disproved by digging deeper. Unlike the previous data set, which showed the “top” sales volume performers had the more valuable Likes, this data tells another story entirely. In fact, some of Ecwid’s stats shows that pages with a smaller number of fans have much bigger “FB sales per Like” value.

The Facebook learning curve is still just that, a curve. And we’re steadily driving through it trying to determine which direction to take next.

As always – thoughts are welcome!