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?
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