Twitter Crushing Facebook's Click-Through Rate: Report
What is the most effective way for marketers to spread their message online? Facebook? Twitter? Company blogs? Email? — According to a new report by marketing firm SocialTwist, Internet sharing trends have shifted heavily …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second year running that measurement vendors have called the race for Twitter: back in August 2009, Twitter had already overtaken Facebook as the top link inside e-mail, and Hitwise's March 2009 piece on where Twitter's traffic was heading framed the platform as a referral engine rather than a destination. SocialTwist's new report sharpens that argument from volume to quality — it claims shared messages on Twitter convert to clicks at a higher rate than those on Facebook.
First-order effects
- Marketers reading SocialTwist's numbers face a direct budget question: whether to weight share-based campaigns toward Twitter's smaller-but-better-clicking audience rather than Facebook's larger one.
- Facebook's countermove is already visible this week — the revamped Groups product announced October 9 and the planned joint social-search announcement with Bing both aim to make its sharing more actionable.
Second-order effects
- Measurement firms like SocialTwist gain outsized influence: when a single vendor's click-through comparison moves channel budgets, the methodology of share-tracking itself becomes a competitive battleground.
- E-mail keeps its role as the baseline against which both social networks are measured — any claim that Twitter or Facebook 'wins' still has to beat the inbox, keeping pressure on both platforms to prove downstream value.
Third-order effects
- If marketers keep rewarding click-through over raw audience size, the social platforms' contest shifts from user counts to conversion quality — a structure that favors whoever builds the best attribution story for advertisers.
The trend: Social sharing channels are being judged by click-through performance rather than audience size, forcing Facebook and Twitter to compete for advertiser dollars on measured conversion instead of reach.