On Friday, Allen Mireles shared a MarketingProfs post titled Email Trumps Social Media for Sharing, enquiring what people thought were the implications. I tweeted the post, as I found the data quite interesting. She prompted me again, tweeting ”What conclusions do you draw?” So, here are my conclusions, Allen.
Given the different platforms, I don’t believe the results are that surprising. They reinforce these three principles, which I’ve been leaning toward for other reasons as well:
Principle 1: Willingness to share content is directly related to the ability to control who sees the content
Principle 2: Engagement is greater in mediums where the poster can target content to recipients
Principle 3: Click-through is greater in mediums that facilitate headlines and scanning.
The Study
Differences Between the Networks
Willingness to Share
Engagement
Click-through
Conclusions for social media users
Conclusions for the social networks
The Study
The key points from the study are:
- People share content the most via email and Facebook, with Twitter lagging. “Nearly one-half (46%) of content-sharing activity initiated comes via email, another 33% from Facebook, and 14% from other channels, such as Digg, Delicious, and LinkedIn. Only 6% of shared content comes via Twitter.”
- Click-through rates, on the other hand, are higher with Twitter than with email or Facebook. “While Twitter trails as a recipient of shared content, users tend to have higher click-through rates: 40% of clicks come from shared articles on Twitter, 35% from email and other social channels (combined), and 25% from Facebook.”
- User engagement is, again, higher with email and least with Twitter. Email users visited an average of 2.95 pages, Facebook users 2.76 pages, and Twitter 1.66 pages.
Differences Between the Networks
I’ve blogged a lot recently about Trusted Sources, etc. If you think about these different platforms in terms of Trust Circles, email certainly represents the highest level of trust. You invite people to your email account, by giving them your email address. You choose who can contact you via email. Your email account is not easily discoverable. It facilitates extensive conversations about even very private and personal information, or very specific business information.
Facebook provides some safeguards to access: you have to accept people into your network as friends. However, your account is generally discoverable on Facebook, and there are pressures/incentives to accept people as Friends whom you might not chose to give your email address to. You tend to gain a wider and extended network that includes people whom you’ve been out of touch with or who are friends of friends, and may not know you that well.
Twitter, on the other hand is a public network, that makes it very easy for people to discover you and facilitates building broad connections with people you’ve never met in person at all. Probably most Twitter users’ followers are people they’ve never met in person and that they didn’t know until they joined Twitter. Primarily, people on Twitter share information of general, rather than very personal, interest.
(LinkedIn, by the way, falls somewhere between Facebook and Twitter, depending on how and how much you use it.)
Willingness to share
Principle 1: Willingness to share content is directly related to the ability to control who sees that content.
(Note that the article didn’t specify exactly what content the study measured the sharing of.) In email, you specifically choose who you are sending content to. Since you have total control over who sees that info, you are probably more willing to share different types of content, even private/proprietary content or content that is revealing (such as political content that reveals your political views).
In Facebook, every post to your wall is being seen by a large group of people. Your control of who sees a given post is not as fine as with email. You may hesitate to share some types of content or information you think will only be of interest to a few. In Twitter, your posts are totally public and available for anyone to see. You are only going to be willing to share certain kinds of information there: not too private or proprietary, not too revealing.
Engagement
Principle 2: Engagement is greater in mediums where the poster can target content to recipients.
Who is most likely to send/post information of interest and relevant to you? The people who know you best. Which networks predominantly give access to people who know you or your interests? Email, of course. And Facebook. In Twitter, your connections consist primarily of people you’ve only recently met, and often only online. Those people don’t know you as well.
With email, you have to pick recipients, and you’re going to send content to the people you think or know will like that content. In Facebook, you’re posting what you find interesting and want to share (like new photos or the band you saw tonight), which many, but not all, of your friends are also likely to find interesting. In Twitter, people post for a variety of reasons, but Twitter’s broadcast style means that unless you’re using your Twitter account in a very targeted way, each post is likely to be of interest to only a subset of your followers. It’s 140 character limit can also mean that less information is conveyed about the link, and users click on it only to find the content isn’t really relevant to them.
Click-Through Rate
Principle 3: Click-through is greater in mediums that facilitate headlines and scanning.
Click-through is affected by a different set of factors. In this case, I think the culprit is the UI of the mediums—and Twitter fares better. That’s because the Twitter stream is highly scannable. It consists of short messages, each on its own line. The 140 character length forces people to write concise headlines and there’s incentive (and competition) to make these headlines catchy, engaging, etc. (Of course, sometimes they are misleading, as well.)
Email offers a subject field, which is similarly abbreviated. Depending upon your email system, you may see the first part of each message, as well. This format is also scannable, but the pressure for writing concise and enticing, short headlines isn’t as great. We all know that the quality of subject lines varies by sender. Facebook has a horridly unscannable page, cluttered with graphics, comment blocks, icons, etc. LinkedIn has similar issues. Hence, their click-throughs are lower.
Conclusions for Social Media Users
Engagement This one’s simple. The best way to engage users is to send them information they will actually find of interest. So:
- decide who your target audience is on Twitter or Facebook, design your account use to attract that audience, and then post information of interest to them.
- get to know your followers on Twitter and the friends on Facebook that you don’t know well. Use a CRM system or other system to store information about them. Then, @ people the specific pieces of content you think will interest them, or post on their wall with the link.
Click-through Write headlines. In email, treat your subject line as a headline and craft it as well as you would a tweet or a blog title. On Facebook, do the same. And on Facebook, LinkedIn, and similar networks, when your aim is to get click-through, keep it short. The format of both networks encourages lengthy text, but lengthy text discourages users from clicking. At the very least, make sure you have a catchy first line.
Conclusions for the Social Networks
Willingness to Share As I blogged about last week, what it means for Facebook is that they are going in the wrong direction with their privacy settings. Social networks like Facebook, and possibly LinkedIn, would do better to make it easy for users to group their contacts and assign privacy levels for those groups. Users need to have control over the information they reveal about themselves and to others.
Engagement To increase engagement, the first step is to ensure that users can target posts: specifying who sees each post or where it appears. This allows users to “send” posts to the people who will be most interested in it. Facebook just implemented a drop-down for posts that lets you specify who can see the post, but they don’t display the user’s Lists! They need to add that feature. Twitter could benefit by making it possible for users send tweets to Lists, without having those same tweets appear on the public timeline. This allows users to tweet information relevant to a given group without muddying the timeline for other groups.
Click-through Facebook (and LinkedIn) need to redo the home pages to make them more scannable and less cluttered. They could go a long way just by making it easy for users to bold selected sentences or words in their posts. They could offer at least one more scannable view that looks more like Twitter’s stream, with all the comments, photos, etc. viewable by clicking to expand the item. They might want to build in incentives that encourage users to create well-crafted headlines (a streamlined view, itself might be incentive enough).
What do you think? Do you agree with my conclusions?
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