For mobile in-app sharing, Twitter tops Facebook 3-1
Mobile developers are increasingly finding the power of social integration in their apps, which is one way to make them engaging and sticky and to help get the word out about their apps. But all social integrations are not equal.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mobile developers have spent 2011 hunting for built-in growth levers, and social integration is emerging as the cheapest one — a ReadWriteMobile survey in August found them placing more promise in Google+ than in iCloud as a platform bet. The new GigaOM tally shows where that preference lands in practice: when apps add a share hook, they pick Twitter about three times as often as Facebook.
That is a reversal of the web-era hierarchy, when Facebook's app canvas was the destination — the 2007 race in which RockYou! overtook Slide defined that generation of platform builders. Twitter's edge now rests on a lighter-weight integration plus its t.co link wrapping, which hands developers engagement data back, and on Jack Dorsey's September pledge that Twitter will keep giving developers the tools to build businesses on top of it.
First-order effects
- Developers shipping mobile apps get a low-friction viral loop through Twitter's share integration, while Facebook cedes the default share slot in a fast-growing class of apps it dominated on the desktop web.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces pressure to make its mobile sharing SDK as lightweight as Twitter's, since every app that defaults to Twitter routes sign-ups and re-engagement — and the referral traffic behind them — away from Facebook's graph.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ownership of the in-app share button becomes contested infrastructure: whoever sits on the share route captures the engagement signals and audience data that monetize mobile distribution, echoing how t.co already lets Twitter see every link its users touch.
The trend: Mobile app growth is shifting from paid placement toward built-in social sharing, turning the share button itself into a battleground between platforms.