Facebook Crushes Twitter for Michael Jackson News Sharing by 500%
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.
Read More
My favorite part of what we do for clients involves mapping the intricicies of how social actions and content spread throughout the web. We’ve been creating some really interesting strategies lately and unfortunately most of that work is so client specific I can’t share it.
