Twitter Surpasses Facebook as Top Link in E-mail
Social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group last week released a report supporting the theory that there's a direct link between a brand's social media efforts and revenue growth.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter overtaking Facebook as the top link shared in e-mail caps a run of momentum for the service this year: Silicon Alley Insider mapped which sites were capturing its May 2009 traffic explosion, and TechCrunch ranked the most engaged brands on the web just weeks ago. The ClickZ story lands alongside the Wetpaint–Altimeter Group report claiming a direct line between social engagement and revenue growth, giving marketers a reason to treat link-share rankings as a budget input rather than a curiosity.
First-order effects
- Email marketers who benchmark against Facebook shares now see Twitter as their top outbound referral source, shifting which platform they optimize copy and calls-to-action for.
- Wetpaint and Altimeter Group gain a fresh proof point for their engagement-drives-revenue thesis at exactly the moment brands are deciding where to allocate social budgets.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces pressure to make link-sharing frictionless enough to reclaim the e-mail channel, where Twitter's URL-centric format currently wins by default.
- Brands that scored high on the Wetpaint–Altimeter engagement index get an incentive to concentrate effort on Twitter, since its link mechanics convert directly into measurable email-driven traffic.
Third-order effects
- If link-share rankings keep feeding budget decisions, social platforms will be judged less on user counts and more on how well their native formats propagate URLs through channels like email — a metric Twitter is structurally built to win.
- Analytics vendors and consultants stand to institutionalize these cross-channel comparisons, turning 'top link in e-mail' style reports into recurring benchmarks that shape platform competition.
The trend: Brand social spending is being steered by measured outcomes like link propagation, favoring platforms whose formats are built around the URL.