After Don’s post about the social media bubble last week, we got a couple of great comments defending social media. As an avid defender of social media, I thought I’d weigh in with our own research to show the real impact of the three platforms.
The Reach of Facebook
Social media put to the test – does email outperform Twitter and Facebook?
The truth is that it’s really hard to tell the exact reach you have on Facebook. You can tell how many people click on your articles, but how many people are really seeing your content?
The definite benefit to Facebook is that you have unlimited opportunities to get visibility. The more that people comment and like something you post on your wall, the more likely it will continue to show up at the top of your fan’s feeds over and over again. In terms of visibility, Facebook can give you the ultimate exposure as long as you have a good amount of fans to “like” your stuff.
The Reach of Email
Email marketing is incredibly simple. You send an email, and a small percentage of the emails you send will be opened. An even smaller number will get clicked and send traffic to your website. Email marketing does allow you to send niche messages to exactly the people who you want to read it, but does that really mean that you’ll be “getting through” to more people?
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The Reach of Twitter
The greatness of Twitter is that you don’t have one chance to post something, like you do with email. You have as many chances as you want, because chances are that the same people who will see it now, are not the same people who would have seen it an hour ago. But does this decrease your click-through rate, since only about 20% of your viewers will even see the message?
If Facebook has maximum visibility — then what’s better, Twitter or email?
Visibility is great, but it’s even better when people actually click through to your website. From doing research on our own content, we only found a 0.74% difference in click-through rate between email and Twitter.
Email was technically the winner, in terms of getting the largest percentage of viewers to click through. However, Twitter garnered 72% more opportunities for someone to click. So in terms of the number of clicks we received, Twitter brought in the most website traffic.
So our conclusion is this — use all three. Twitter and Facebook are free, traffic-generating platforms. Even if your actual click-through rate is lower than email, your traffic numbers may actually be higher.
I like this topic of email vs. Facebook. Have you considered social commerce in your analysis? “Even if your actual click-through rate is lower than email, your traffic numbers may actually be higher.” One alternative is to use commerce. Rather than looking at the click through rate from Facebook, our clients (note, I am with Moontoast) place shareable stores within their Walls, which also show up in their fans’ Newsfeeds. Our clients see thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of revenue from their Facebook campaigns AND then get the added benefit of their promotional stores being shared by a portion of their fan base (is your email ever shared?). Note promotions don’t need to be discounts.
Blog, RSS, Tweet, post and mail… why choose when you can do all three with little more effort than just blogging.
And its clear that different people prefer different ways to follow their favorite sources.
Don