This week’s most stunning statistic: In February, Facebook drove more traffic to the Guardian web site than Google did.This fact was proffered (I couldn’t bring myself to write shared) at the Changing Medias Summit Conference by Tanya Corduroy, Guardian’s director for digital development (full text of her speech):

Eighteen months ago, search represented 40% of the Guardian’s traffic and social represented just 2%. Six months ago – before the launch of our Facebook app – these figures had barely moved.

A recent Pew report echoed these figures, revealing that just 9% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations from Facebook or from Twitter. That compares with 32% who get news from search.

But last month, we felt a seismic shift in our referral traffic. For the first time in our history, Facebook drove more traffic to guardian.co.uk than Google for a number of days, accounting for more than 30% of our referrer traffic. This is a dramatic result from a standing start five months ago.

She made her point with a graph showing the crossing of the two traffic lines, even though the Facebook referrals now appear to be receding:

This is obviously a great achievement for the team who created the FB app. Overall, The Guardian’s relentless pursuit of digital innovation is paying off. Its last monthtraffic stats are staggering: more than 4 million unique browsers (+64% vs. Feb 2011) and almost 70 million unique browser monthly (+76% vs. Feb 2011). As for its mobile site, it is growing at a year-to-year rate of… 182%, with 640,000 unique browsers a month.

The Guardian Facebook App played a critical role in this rise in traffic. Over the last five months, 8 million people downloaded it and 40,000 are signing up every day, again according to Tanya Cordrey.

More at: http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/03/26/the-sharing-mirage/

Let’s consider the news media sector. From a pure quantitative standpoint, Facebook remains a solid referral for news sites as people “Like” and link to stories. But Facebook encourages fly-bys, ie viewers that won’t stay on the site. Twitter’s referrals to news content are of a different nature. Tweets and retweeets usually come from people who have chosen to follow a given individual, a news organisation or a specific subject. The referral is therefore much sharper, more targeted than the impulsive “throw-on-my-Facebook-wall” type.

For what it worth, let’s look at an essay published last Saturday in the Wall Street Journal. Titled Why Can’t Wall Street Handle the Truth, it is written by Mike Mayo, a long-time analyst who made repeated calls to dump bank stocks.

The essay generated 795 Facebook “likes” – which is small for a story that is freely available in the WSJ Social Facebook application:

In the meantime, the same piece (and the mention of Mayo’s book) has been indexed 140,000 times in Google, thanks to only 392 tweets.

Still using the Wall Street Journal as an example, let’s have look at Walt Mossberg’s presence (he is the Journal’s world-famous tech writer). On Facebook, his page has 874 “likes”. On the WSJ Social application, where Mossberg appears as an editor, he has 252 readers and the app has been able to collect a total “23K readers”

Not very compelling.

But, on Twitter, Mossberg has 264,000 followers.

Another key element in Twitter’s favour: the mobile factor. Twitter’s 140-character format turned out to be a killer on smartphones: according to recent ComScore study, about 13.5% of Twitter users are mobile ones, vs 7% for Facebook and 5% for LinkedIn. And the microblogging service is growing faster on mobile (+75% year on year) than LinkedIn (+69%) and Facebook (+50%). That’s the privilege of simplicity and straightforwardness over feature-itis.

More at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/07/twitter-facebook?