Twitter Followers Advocate, But Facebook Fans Share News

An ExactTarget study makes the claim that your Twitter followers are more valuable than Facebook fans. Summarizes eMarketer: "Daily Twitter users who followed a brand were more than twice as likely as daily Facebook users who 'liked' a brand to say they were more likely to purchase from the brand after becoming a social media follower." (NB: What people say they are likely to do is highly dubious data.)

I'd argue that for a media site, the value runs the other way. Our Twitter engagement is with colleagues and fans who enjoy a more active, thumbnail-news alert presence. We sometimes have back-and-forths on Twitter, but mostly we're pinging people with news-bites. If it's highly clickable, sure, we'll see retweets, but if it's a quiet, unassuming little story, then not so much. On Twitter, that is.

The people on Facebook I think are also fans but not of our "performance" necessarily--they are fans of sharing. It's not a study, but I do have data for this. We've not been fanatic about our social media presence in any way. We have 585 Twitter followers, and we have 187 Facebook fans. Guess which group provided 35 percent of our referral traffic the last 30 days?

Twitter brought in just seven percent of our referrals, despite The SunBreak appearing on 60 lists. (Admittedly, we did have a very popular story about Facebook members during that time. But still, the previous 30 days yields a 26 percent Facebook to 9 percent Twitter split.)

I've always wondered about Twitter's scale--I'm hardly alone in noticing that its one-to-many effects tend to work in just that one direction. But, personally, I've also noticed that the Twitter experience is prone to dilution. The more sources you follow on Twitter, the less attention you can pay to any single one. You're not penalized for skimming the flotsam and jetsam of your Twitter stream.

On the other hand, the non-scaling side of individual social networks works in favor of relevancy, while providing, nonetheless, a huge potential crowd of new readers.

When I run analytics for the past year, I find that despite the number of our Twitter followers roughly doubling, our referral traffic has remained about the same. However, even with the number of our Facebook fans not quite doubling (soon, soon), our Facebook referral traffic has. It's grown throughout the summer, despite that typically being a slower time. In our small way, we seem to be seeing evidence of the hype that Facebook--move over, CNN--could be where people go first for their news.