Small-business owners who are skeptical about Facebook as a marketing tool might want to check out a forthcoming case study from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Last year, professors from the school teamed with a local restaurant chain to see whether having a presence on the social network would have any practical impact on business. The results strongly suggest that it did, though only with a select group of people.
The school’s partner in the experiment was Dessert Gallery, a bakery and café chain in Houston that had no previous social media presence. Before launching the store’s Facebook page, the school surveyed nearly 700 of the chain’s regular customers. Those same customers were invited to become fans of Dessert Gallery on Facebook once the page was created. Seventy-five of those respondents accepted.
Dessert Gallery wasn’t shy about using its fan page once it was launched. The store updated the page several times a week with everything from pictures of its baked goods to contests to playful promotions.
After three months, the school once again surveyed the respondents. It turned out that Facebook did have an appreciable impact on their behavior. Dessert Gallery’s Facebook fans visited the stores 20 percent more often than non-fans and spent 33 percent more overall. They didn’t spend more money per visit than non-fans, but they did spend 45 percent more of their dining-out budgets at Dessert Gallery.
The fan page seemed to yield intangible benefits, too. Dessert Gallery fans reported a greater emotional attachment to the brand: 3.4 on a four-point scale, compared with 3.0 for non-fans.
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