The purpose of this post isn’t to analyze the virality of Michael Jackon’s death, but to look at the comparative virality of social platforms purely from a users perspective.
This nifty little graphic was provided to me by fellow DC Tech Titan and uber-community manager Justin Thorp of Clearspring/Add This. It simply shows what social networks or social book marking sites news about Michael Jackson death was “Shared” to. The “Share” button is powered by Add This is served over 20 billion times per month! Click to see a bigger image:
While Add This wouldn’t provide the scale of the y-axis, my guess is that each line is a million Shares. The x-axis counts 10 second incriments, so this is a 40 minute snapshot of the buzz associated with Michael Jackson’s death as it became known publicly.
If each line is a million shares, then news of Michael Jackon’s death was shared to Facebook almost 7 million times in a 10 second period while it was shared to Twitter at about 1.3 million times in that 10 second period.
The purpose of this post isn’t to analyse Michael Jackon’s death virality, but to look at the comparative virality of these platforms purely from a users perspective. It’s pretty clear that when given a choice, when someone sees an AddThis button on a hot news item, they are roughly 5x more likely to share it to Facebook then they are to send it to twitter or even Myspace.
I’m a big fan of both Twitter and Facebook kicking off, and running buzz marketing campaigns – but if we had one property to choose from it would certainly be Facebook.
Comments
this is a very relevant thing to know about. thanks justin & peter.
there’s a omission, and maybe its intended, in the analysis of the “broadcast size audiences” of some twitter accounts, and that is the average number of accounts a twitter user is following. i won’t like to state the grim figures of how bad the attention span on twitter is, BUT, facebook provides the same amount of cognitive load with just a few friends. you can manage 10x more followers in twitter than the number of friends on facebook, and SO …
… the attention span on facebook is 10x better than twitter, is what i felt.
AND … another issue is about the shortened urls on twitter, they just don’t have that feature called confidence built into them, whereas facebook goes all animal[title, body, thumbs to choose] with a url you hand it over. worthy of my attention.
That is huge news, thankyou for sharing. You sometimes wonder who does best.
“…they are roughly 5x more likely to share it to Facebook then they are to send it to twitter or even Myspace…”
We often try to guess at how these services compare in carrying certain kinds of information, but it’s nice to have more empirical data on how Facebook and Twitter (…) actually perform virally.
Many thanks for this piece, Peter and to both of you for your very informative blog. Good stuff.