… as he eyes up a potential target to acquire? We’ve been pondering this idea for a while now, ever since Kraft acquired one of Britain’s most beloved brands, Cadbury, in January, a deal we referred to as the “first mega-merger of the Facebook era.” At the time of the deal, Kraft, the aggressor, had a relatively thin fan following on its various social media channels while Cadbury counted millions of devotees across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A similar mismatch is playing out in the soda wars with American softdrink brand Reed’s set to acquire Jones Soda for about $10 million.

The tale of the tape is similar this time round: the acquirer, Reed’s, has a paltry Facebook presence and very little social media juice elsewhere while Jones has built a vibrant community of 388,000 devoted fans on Facebook. A back-of-the-envelope calculation would then say that at a $10 million asking price that pulls a per-fan value of roughly $25.

Sounds ludicrous?

Hear me out. If you are looking for a measuring stick for “loyalty,” a metric that may tell us how a deal plays out over time, then the number of Facebook fans is a wise metric to consider. And there’s fresh research to bear out the theory that amassing a large and loyal Facebook and Twitter following is good for business. According to a new study out this week, the number of Facebook and Twitter users are likely to buy the brands they follow, and even more likely to recommend these brands friends and family buy them too.

We expect some day soon M&A specialists will be inspecting these numbers as they negotiate the next mega-mergers of the Facebook era.