Skip to main content

Is Sharing More Valuable for Publishers on Facebook or Twitter? [STATS]

 
In the age of micropublishing, how many people are actually reading what you tweet or share on Facebook? And more importantly, how does the click-per-share ratio compare between the two very different social platforms that are utilized by millions of users every day for consuming and sharing content?
These are questions that keep social media strategists awake at night (or maybe just me). So at Mashable, we decided to take a look at our own data and see how user behavior compares between Facebook and Twitter, the two social media sites that generate the most referral traffic to Mashable.com.
After pulling three months worth of our social data and calculating the click-per-share (CPS), it appears that users on Twitter are more likely to share an article rather than read it, whereas users on Facebook click on more articles than they share. According to our social data, Twitter received roughly 0.38 clicks per tweet, whereas Facebook received 3.31 clicks per engagement (the number of times people posted a Mashable link to Facebook through an action on a social plugin or through a Wall post). This would mean that a Facebook action gets roughly 8.7x more clicks than a tweet.

Calculating the Click-Per-Share


Before we get into the why, I want to quickly explain the numbers and some potential discrepancies. First, I want to emphasize that these results are not conclusive but may instead by representative of Mashable’s unique audience.
For some context, Mashable receives roughly 20% of its visits from social media sites, with Twitter and Facebook accounting for 14% of those referred visits. I calculated the click-per-share for Twitter after looking at the number of total retweets Mashable has received in the last three months. To give you an idea, we average roughly 124,000 retweets per day for our main @Mashable account, which has 2.2 million followers. These numbers include both RTs and the native Twitter.com retweets across Twitter.com and third-party applications.
Here is where the tricky part comes in: We can only accurately separate the clicks that take place on Twitter.com, as third-party apps are bundled with other platforms these links are shared on. To compensate for this discrepancy, we adjusted the clicks number based on Sysomos research, which recently concluded that 58% of tweets come from official Twitter applications, 35.4% of which are Twitter.com. Based on these numbers, we calculated that each tweet receives 0.38 clicks per tweet.
For Facebook, we looked at the total number of actions on Facebook that result in Mashable links for the past three months. This includes likes, shares, comments and links being posted to one’s Wall. Looking at Facebook.com clicks on those links, we determined that each action received roughly 3.31 clicks. Both of these calculations were compared and compiled based off internal tracking numbers used from both platforms’ APIs and clicks on our bit.ly links, which includes those shared by Mashable and our readers, with numbers from our referral analytics.
As an aside, Facebook and Twitter visitors also spent 29% more time on Mashable.com and viewed 20% more pages than visitors arriving via search engines.

Are Shares More Valuable than Tweets?


Though Eventbrite’s experience is that Facebook “Likes” are more profitable than tweets, with news content it’s not that simple. But the data may suggest that comparing user activity on Facebook and Twitter — two very different social environments and userbases — may be a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. You have to consider the differences between the way content is displayed on each platform. On Twitter, it is a real-time stream with text and a link, occupying fewer pixels on a screen. The majority of tweets are uniform, and for a user, one tweet can get lost in a fast-moving stream.
Facebook’s News Feed, however, is driven based on algorithms that take into account previous engagement and your social graph. Further, story links typically include a user’s comment, with a headline of the story, thumbnail and blurb. This takes up more real estate in the feed. But engagement activity has a short life on Facebook as well, with less than 20% of likes occurring after 24 hours.
In general, within Mashable’s audience, the number of tweets vs. actions on Facebook was far higher, which makes sense considering there are nearly 100 million tweets posted per day, 25% of them containing links. However, it also might be a result of our distribution on the two different platforms (Twitter: 2.2 million vs. Facebook: 460,000+). It’s also worth considering that Facebook has far more users (nearing 600 million) and sees roughly 1 billion pieces of content (news stories, photos, links, etc.) shared each day, with an average user having 130 friends.
The recent “Like Log Study” by Yahoo Labs examined the Facebook distribution of top media companies, and estimated that there are roughly 10 Facebook “likes” per 1,000 pageviews. It also found that on Facebook, frequency of publishing to Facebook didn’t matter in terms of attracting actions, and that the majority of actions came from a few stories that performed really well. On Twitter, most active users have fewer connections.
The point is these two platforms are very different in their user interactions, which results in a disparity of clicks on stories between the two, at least for Mashable.com. Because we have such a unique audience, we’d love to know if others are finding a similar disparity in their click-per-share on Facebook and Twitter. Please share your findings in the comments below.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Evolution Of Computer Virus [infographic]

4 Free Apps For Discovering Great Content On the Go

1. StumbleUpon The granddaddy of discovering random cool stuff online, StumbleUpon will celebrate its 10th anniversary later this year — but its mobile app is less than a year old. On the web, its eight million users have spent the last decade recommending (or disliking) millions of webpages with a thumbs up / thumbs down system on a specially installed browser bar. The StumbleUpon engine then passes on recommendations from users whose interests seem similar to yours. Hit the Stumble button and you’ll get a random page that the engine thinks you’ll like. The more you like or dislike its recommendations, the more these random pages will surprise and delight. Device : iPhone , iPad , Android 2. iReddit Reddit is a self-described social news website where users vote for their favorite stories, pictures or posts from other users, then argue vehemently over their meaning in the comments section. In recent years, it has gained readers as its competitor Digg has lost them.

‘Wireless’ humans could backbone new mobile networks

People could form the backbone of powerful new mobile internet networks by carrying wearable sensors. The sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations.Engineers from Queen’s Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology are working on a new project based on the rapidly developing science of body-centric communications.Social benefits could include vast improvements in mobile gaming and remote healthcare, along with new precision monitoring of athletes and real-time tactical training in team sports, an institute release said.The researchers are investigating how small sensors carried by members of the public, in items such as next generation smartphones, could communicate with each other to create potentially vast body-to-body networks.The new sensors would interact to transmit data, providing ‘anytime, anywhere’ mobile network connectivity.Simon Cotton from the i