Sharing on Facebook vs. Sharing on Twitter

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Sharing on Facebook vs. Sharing on Twitter

vía Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog de Amit el 22/12/09

Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter and therefore it is obvious that more content gets shared through Facebook than on Twitter.

Now the next important question — what happens after you share a web page (or an image or a video) on these social sites. Who is more likely to check the link that you just shared – your Twitter friends or your Facebook contacts?

ShareThis, which is one of the most used social sharing widget, has an answer.

Fig A: Who is clicking on that shared content?

Twitter users click more..

According to ShareThis, while only 5% of the content-sharing activity happens on Twitter (compared to 33% on Facebook), Twitter users are more likely to click on shared links than Facebook users (see graph A).

This however doesn't mean that Twitter users are more engaging – they have no other choice but to visit the shared page because the short URLs that they see inside the tweets rarely say anything about the destination. Facebook users, on the other hand, get to see image thumbnails and page excerpts in the share itself so they can better decide whether or not to visit the destination page.

..but Facebook users will spend more time

The other interesting part is that if a person lands on your site through Facebook, he will explore your site in greater detail than someone coming from Twitter. In numbers, a visitor from Twitter will check 1.66 pages on your site (average) while a Facebook user will spend more time checking out 2.76 pages.

Fig B: What happens after the landing-page?