The Atomic Blog

The PR Value of Facebook & Twitter

Written by Sean Mulholland

Two recent Fast Company articles have shed some quantitative light on the actual value of Facebook and Twitter, and helped to reinforce some of our internal observations here at Atomic Digital.

With regards to clickthroughs, SocialTwist reports that Twitter users click through 6.6x more often than do Facebook users, despite Facebook being by far the most popular sharing platform among users. This is based on analyzing 1MM clickthroughs of user shares via their “Tell a friend” tool.

In another report, Eventbrite reports that sharing event information through Facebook was 5.8x as valuable as doing the same through Twitter. Based on mining months of sales data, they calculated that each time a user shared an event via Facebook it generated $2.52 in ticket sales vs. only $0.43 for each Twitter share.

Both of these articles contain important insights from a PR perspective. Given the higher clickthrough rate of Twitter, sharing general news via that medium may indeed be more effective. With Twitter often used as a broadcasting medium this makes sense, as oftentimes people will have a much wider network on Twitter vs. Facebook, which is often kept more personal.

The Eventbrite data however shows that under the right circumstances the more personal network of Facebook proves more valuable. For events shared among friends there is a high likelihood that many of one’s friends live nearby (and thus are able to attend), and friends often share each others’ tastes. From a PR perspective this shows that Facebook may have advantages for local or grassroots initiatives.

Unfortunately neither article addresses Facebook fan pages, which are Twitter like in their messages often being more of a broadcast than a personal connection among friends. Our internal observations have shown fan pages can be tremendously effective, both for driving traffic and conversions for cause-related campaigns.

//img via respres