Social Media Heavy Weight bout part Deux

In our last installment we looked at how the two social media titans, Facebook and Twitter actually used social media themselves.  Our analysis showed they were both heavy users of their own dog food, but didn’t stray outside of their own box much.

This round we look at how the two titans match up across the board using some social media analytics tools.  First off we’ll look at how the two fare overall using Social Mention.

 

Twitter	Facebook

 

As we can see, Facebook scores better on strength, passion, and sentiment.  This suggests that Facebook has a higher likelihood of being discussed, and when discussed, much more likely to be favorable than Twitter.  Twitter has more reach, with more individuals talking about twitter than Facebook with a healthy ratio of generally 5 positive comments to 1 negative comment.  We’ll give round one to Facebook.

Let’s look specifically at Twitter traffic and see how the two rivals stack up.  Luckily Topsy provides us with analysis of twitter traffic.  Here we see counts of tweets per day for the last month mentioning Facebook, Twitter, and Social Networks.

This data confirms the Social Mention reach metrics, clearly showing that Twitter (at least on Twitter) has a higher volume of mentions.  Based on this data and overall reach/mentions, we’ll give this round to Twitter.

For our decider we’ve chosen Follower Wonk to make the final judgment in our Social Media smack down.  Normally we would analyze the followers of each of these companies, but the tool limits analysis to accounts with less than 850,000 followers.  The two combined have over 44 Million followers.  Given the limitation we choose to analyze who the company follows.

Delving into the details we see that Twitter follows more users, has more followers, and higher retweet percentage.  We also see that Twitter has a higher total and weekly tweets as well as engagement and followers per day which confirms the data we saw with Social Mention.  Now, this is Twitter’s home turf, so we’d expect Twitter to rough up any contenders on their own platform so the judges have met and we’re going to call this round a draw.  So let us know who you think is better in Social Media, Twitter or Facebook

 

Are Social Networks Social?

We often are asked to look at companies and how they utilize social media to support their brands, reach out to customers, and increase mindshare.  Let’s take a look at how two of the biggest social networks themselves use other social media.

Facebook vs. Twitter

Two of the titans of social media, Facebook and Twitter are both in the top ten visited sites daily on the internet and have over 1.1 billion users worldwide.  They process millions of messages daily from their users and provide the infrastructure for countless other companies and individuals to reach out to their audience.  The question remains, just how social are these two titans?  Our review of both companies finds them using the following other social media:

	Facebook	Twitter
Facebook	145 MM Likes 15-20 posts/month	Static customer acquisition page linking to Twitter
Twitter	13.6MM Followers 3-4 tweets/month	29.9MM Follwers 30+ tweets/month
Instagram	161,000 followers 3-10 posts/month	6,000 followers Inactive page
Tumblr	No presence	No presence
YouTube	No official presence	49,000 followers, little activity
Pinterest	No presence	2,700 followers, 17 boards
Blog	Newsroom.fb.com Actively updated	Blog.twitter.com Actively updated
Google+	No Presence	No Presence

 

As we can see from the preceding table, ironically both Twitter and Facebook have a fairly limited social media presence, mostly utilizing blogs and their own infrastructure.  Facebook does utilize Twitter with 13.6 million followers but is sending a small number of tweets.

The most active social media device outside of their own infrastructure that each company uses is their respective blogs which contain press releases, engineering knowledge publishing, and other information. 

Overall, the reach into social media is limited for both Facebook and Twitter to their own systems.  Facebook has some use of twitter, but is not very active and both companies seem to rely on their own users for outreach and are either actively resistant to using other social media or ironically have not made inroads into using other social media as alternative channels.  Both companies would be well suited to set aside their hubris in the goal of reaching out to more users and getting feedback and interaction with those people that are not using their products or that have left their networks.