Facebook or Twitter: Which is better?

Longtime readers of 3 Things know that the title of this week’s post is a trick question that begs a real question: better for what?

A spate of recent articles argue vociferously and sometimes convincingly for one or the other channel. Our take:

1. People use Twitter to get news and information.
All of the data points to Twitter as an “information network”, not a “social network.” With props to Gideon Rosenblatt, who wrote a terrific article analyzing this point, our take is that Twitter is effectively a broadcast medium. An efficient, trackable, useful broadcast medium, but fundamentally broadcast and not social.

In honor of yesterday’s World Statistics Day, our favorite combination of statistics illustrating this point:

• 71% of tweets get no response (no retweet, no reply).
• Twitter’s click-through-rate (roughly, the number of clicks per link posted) is 1904% (versus Facebook’s click through rate of 287%). That means every link on Twitter gets about 19 clicks, versus 3 for each link on Facebook.

Those numbers indicate that to us people aren’t interacting with the content they see on Twitter (or the other people posting it), but they sure are looking at it.

2. People use Facebook to connect with, or at least keep tabs on, each other.
The evidence regarding how people use Facebook is more complicated than the data on Twitter, but there are some compelling clues. People seem to use Facebook to connect with other people they know and the networks of the people they know. People use Facebook to get information about other people, and perhaps even to connect with those other people. Consider this insight, again courtesy of Gideon:

• Twitter shows a low level of reciprocity; 77.9% of user pairs with any link between them are connected one-way, and only 22.1% have reciprocal relationship between them.
• By definition, 100% of user pairs on Facebook are reciprocal: I can’t be friends with you on Facebook unless you’re friends with me, too.

On Twitter, there’s no expectation that you’ll spread things around to your people, because there’s no expectation that your people are paying attention to you there. However, on Facebook, the expectation when you post something, share it, comment on it, or like it is that your people will see that you’ve done that. It’s the point of Facebook – keeping up with your people, and letting them keep up with you. At least one study has shown that we’re happiest when we’re poking around about other people on Facebook, without any specific agenda (“social browsing” is what the study calls it).

World Statistics Day is one of our favorite holidays, so we’ll keep celebrating it with you:

• For video content posted by one provider during the 3rd quarter of 2010, the average number of interactions (defined as likes, comments, or shares) on Facebook was 5.64 per 1,000 views, while Twitter resulted in just 0.75 (presumably retweets or replies, the only ways to interact with content on Twitter).

3. So, which is better? Both. Neither.
Again, this one won’t be a surprise to any longtime readers of 3 Things, but the only way to know which is better is to figure out what, exactly, you’re trying to do (i.e. turn people out an event, increase the number of people reading your articles, raise money, make something “cool”,? See here for some advice on setting goals), then thoroughly test for results on both channels, measure, adjust, and repeat.