Fans or Followers?
So you've heard a lot about the relationship between social networks and traffic. Social networks perform micro-blogging functions and help you to reach out to your customer base or perceived audience. But which social network is superior in terms of raw visits? Which platform draws more people to your business?
From the 1st of March running through until the 30th of June we had 254 visits to our site from Twitter and 247 visits from Facebook. At face value it seems as if Twitter is doing a better job of things (albeit only by a hair's breadth). However; when you consider that our site has 538 Twitter followers and 60 Facebook fans you start to get a very different picture of the importance of these two Social Networks in terms of driven traffic.
These numbers show that over a four month period Facebook gave us roughly 4 visits per fan and Twitter gave us about 0.5 visits per follower. We could say therefore that a single Facebook fan is worth 8 Twitter followers! An article on Search Engine Land by Greg Finn (June 24th, 2011) states that a Facebook fan can generate 20 visits to a website, though Greg gives no indication of the time-period this number relates to.
It's harder to make Facebook friends and fans than it is to gain Twitter followers because Facebook runs on personal connections whereas Twitter bases itself more around content feeding and sharing information. We think that a Facebook fan is more valuable than a Twitter follower but does the effort involved in gaining a Facebook fan outweigh the usefulness of that connection?
If it takes 8 times longer to gain a Facebook fan than a Twitter follower you could say that in terms of investment (both money and time) the two networks remain fairly on-par. However we believe that with the right strategy in place you can gain Facebook fans at a rate which gives you more return on the time which you invest on your social media campaign.
It's important to remember that you don't have to choose between the two social networks. If you don't gain followers on Twitter, those same individuals won't automatically become your Facebook fans instead! The key to social networks isn't to invest all of your time on one single channel but rather to invest the correct amounts of time on the channels relevant to your business.
If you want to learn more, take a look at our social networking training courses...
- The Eazytiger Team
- Author
- Dominika Dronska & James Allen
- Title
- Social Media & SEO Consultant(s)
- Date
- Article added 20th July 2011
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