Facebook vs. Twitter: Who's More Interesting to Social Bookmarkers?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 1:30PM Recently social media analyst Dan Zarella, posted a provocative post, Twitter-Centric Stories are not Heavily Shared on Facebook. I encourage you to read it. Simply put, the questions were: How shareable is a story when someone on Twitter tweets about Twitter vs. Facebook? What happens when someone on Facebook talks about Twitter vs Facebook?
In brief, Dan's research showed that while articles that use the word “Facebook” in their title get shared more often than the average story on both Facebook and Twitter, stories that mention “Twitter” actually get shared less on Facebook. In contrast, Twitter stories shared on Twitter led to a 300% increase in retweets,
Tribal Vanities
In a sense, it's no surprise: These are two very different cultures: The age range skews toward a younger population on Facebook which likes the all-inclusive web services environment. Technorati's 2009 State of the Blogosphere report shows a very high percentage of bloggers (73%) tend to use Twitter, relative to the total internet population as a whole (14%).
If we look at Trendistic data of "Twitter" vs "Facebook" mentions on Twitter, the base level of Twitter talk is considerably higher than that surrounding Facebooky subjects.
Conversely, looking at Facebook's data, we see a similar self-obsession with Facebook-related terms.
Facebook Statistics: "Twitter" vs."Facebook" data from their "Top 15 Status Terms of 2009"
Source: Facebook Data Teams Notes
Interestingly, during the Twitter hey days of March-May 2009, Facebookers themselves chatted up Twitter.
Seeking Agnostics: Key Social Bookmarking & Social News Sites
To look at the interest in "Facebook" vs "Twitter" in a more agnostic setting, I reviewd the trends in Twitter and Facebook as keywords and tags on two of the larger social bookmarking and social news sharing sites, Digg and Delicious.
Recognised as among the most popular social sharing platforms, by latest counts, the number of inbound links for Digg is 383,598,000 and that for Delicious is 427,665, together totally more than inbound links for Twitter (760,750,806).
A set of social bookmarks contains in essence a web users's shared library of interests and topics they deem worthy and exciting enough to share with others. Social bookmarks can be used as indicators of what topics people think are important to understand and have some present or future value, perhaps for an upcoming research project sorting out this fast paced new social media landscape, and sharing with others. For bloggers and webmasters, social bookmarks and their curators play a special role in increasing SEO, driving traffic to their blog posts and web sites. In a broader (but perhaps less agreed on) sense, as social media watchers, the frequency of Twitter vs Facebook social bookmarking can also be viewed as a rough indicator of our personal bets on the "next great social networking platform".
The figure below compares two Digg searches on Facebook vs Twitter performed in late February 2010, excluding the competing term in order to pull out posts that focused primarily on one service vs. general social media articles. Digg's count for "Facebook" totals some 74,624 articles vs "Twitter" related articles at 72,412. These are actually quite comparable, given plus or minue 2000 posts, well within a single month's worth of data. That said, a salient feature of the graphs is that the mentions for Facebook appear to still be on the rise, while those for Twitter are levelling.
What's of interest considering Zarella's data is the difference in Diggs, an indicator of the story's popularity. For the 4 year time period sampled, Facebook-related posts which resulted in more than 5000+ Diggs outnumbers those for Twitter by a factor of five, roughly corresponding to the relative size in Facebook and Twitter active memberships. (According to Compete, Facebook attracted approximately 134 million unique visitors in January. Twitter had 23.5 million unique visitors for the month.) For Diggs exceeding 500+ and 1000+, Facebook bests Twitter by nearly twice as many.
Well, you say, perhaps not so surprising. Digg is not truly agnostic with its alliance since mid-2009 with Facebook Connect.
So let's take a look at the data from Delicious users. Used for private as well as social sharing by researchers and others, with a strong historical bent toward technology topics, this gives us a more "geeks-eye" view on the interest in these two social networking sites.
The figure below shows the trends in social bookmarks for articles posted and tagged "Twitter" or "Facebook", where articles tagged both are eliminated in the search as well as login and home domains, where the bookmarks would be biased toward the user population difference size of these two social networks. The exact searches made can be seen on these pages: Delicious Facebook search and Delicious Twitter search
Comparing "Twitter" to "Facebook" tagged postings, we find over 581,072 results for Twitter and 388,472 for Facebook. "Twitter" tagged postings best "Facebook" postings by over 49% and still today exceed considerably in posted bookmarks per day. However, much as in the Digg data, we see the interest in Twitter is flattening to falling, while Facebook interest still seems on the rise.
Other Social Bookmarking sites. The table below shows search data for several other well-known social bookmarking sites. These are ordered according to inbound links, the highest sites appearing first. (Caution in comparing these: While attempts were made to get the running total, usually the default, the time horizons of each site can be markedly different. For instance, Yahoo Buzz seems to be offering a much narrower time window. Also- except for Reddit, noted with *, all counts were unfiltered so there is overlap in the tagged stories. Technorati is obviously only counting the most influential blogs.)
These are but a small sampling of the over 250+ social bookmarking sites, but it's clear that the more technology-oriented sites show a marked interest in Twitter.
What Does it All Mean?
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this data is that interest as gauged by social bookmarking and sociallnews sites reflects so even an interest in the two social networking platforms, and this despite Facebookers outnumbering Twitterers by over five times.
During the period of much of these graphs (2009) we 've seen Facebook take-on many of Twitter's best-appreciated features: the ability to tag friends or companies they mention in status updates, commenting and real-time updates. Ironically- many of those Delicios and digg postings were about Facebook taking on Twitter features.
The preliminary data indicating a rise in Facebook and levelling off of Twitter interest is consistent with the maturing of both social media and Facebook in particular. A great deal of the ongoing conversation on social networks concerns social media's use for business. As Facebook positions itself as a bonafide business promotions channel, the fact that Facebook's advertising business model seems to be working certainly increases business confidence that its a viable platform for conducting business. The bigger its tribe grows, the more stories (written by more people) it has to share with more people. And interest in how to build great Facebook landing pages,pay-to-learn webinars and podcasts, building great Facebook landing pages and advertising opportunities all swell as the social media consultants see a rising tide of new social media customers.
It will be interesting to see the next shoe to drop, as there are rumors of Facebook including more support of external sites and page bookmarks on the Dashboard in Q2 2010. That may have profound implications for the future of many of these social bookmarking sites, particularly as it addresses one of the key shortcomings of Facebook to many - its closed garden wall architecture.
Twitter's linchpin? That garden wall is anathema to many of the free-spirited freelancers and some of the blogsphere's most prolific, content creators, many of whom built their wide audience through social bookmarking sites and Twitter. And this is, in the end, the content we love to share. Perhaps some hint is afforded by looking at the Technorati data, showing over 1000 more influential blog sites tagged "Twitter" as opposed to "Facebook". While Facebook is still hidden behind its wall, it seems these influential blog sites - along with WordPress, Tumblr and Posterous - may be the best friends Twitter has.
Postscript: This blog author is a fairly frequent user of Twitter and Delicious.
