Social Media

Study Says Twitter Followers Are Better Than Facebook Fans

image from soshable.com A new report saysTwitter users who followed a brand were 2X more likely than Facebookers who “liked” them to say they might make purchase. Marketers may argue that the artist to fan realtionship is deeper than with a deodroant and better served by Facebook than 144 charracters. Then again, there are levels of fandom.



In fact,  most music marketers that I talk to sing the priases of Facebook.  But the study showed that Facebook fans were actually the most likely group to actively state that they're follow status would not lead to a purchase. Opt-in marketing email subsribers fell in the middle.

Twitter followers, email subscribers and Facebook fans was all about the same when asked if they would recommend a brand. 33% of Twitter followers said they were more likely to make a recommendation after that they followed a brand, compared with 24% of email subscribers and 21% of Facebook fans. Again, those who “liked” a brand on Facebook were most likely to actively disagree with the statement.

But before you start letting your Facebook page get as stale as your MySpace page so that you can spend more time tweeting, remember that there are still a lot more people using Facebook than Twitter – even if all fo them may not be quite as engaged.

Bruce Houghton on 09/17/2010 in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (4)
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4 Comments

  1. Interesting article… I’d be interested to see a survey that samples followers of Bands/Artists directly. I’m a little skeptical of these results…
    The study refers to “Brands” which could be anything from jeans to car companies… not which have had a lot of success on Facebook garnering a following. On twitter however… people do follow these companies. I’d argue the opposite about Artists/Bands as they have been able to engage fans better on Facebook than any other platform. You can tell by the hundreds of comments that come after every post for some bands. Not to mention the apps available through reverbnation, damntheradio, the orchard etc… that allow fans to stream music and link to upcoming tour dates.
    Plus… people don’t really “Fan/Like” their Favorite soap, local shop, or jean company on facebook… it’s more about the people. Whereas with Twitter it has been about following people and companies/brands

  2. I agree with John. At NoDepression.com we actively use both Twitter (3700 followers) and Face Book (11,500 fans) to push out links to our content about artists. We track our Twitter links with bit.ly and the click through rates are quite low for the most part, even when the tweets are re-tweeted many times, which they often are. Occasionally we’ll hit on a post that does well, but for the most part Twitter users don’t seem to be very engaged.
    Our Face Book users are very engaged and click through to articles and videos, actively comment, and share our links. Face Book drives a ton of traffic to the website.
    Both are valuable tools but if I could only choose one it would be Face Book hands down.

  3. One of the things I decided pretty early on with World Around Records was that most of the marketing research about “Brands” just doesn’t apply to what we’re doing. We’ve got an unusually literate and activist fan base — the kind of people who would never participate in a marketing survey in the first place, you know?
    Internet Marketing has a very similar problem with their own “Race to the Bottom” where they find themselves targeting their dumbest demographics because that’s usually all they have left after their 30,000 word squeeze pages and endless email push barrages. They alienate a huge part of their audience and then assume those people never mattered because they “didn’t convert.”
    People who are willing to answer a questionaire detailing their feelings toward deodorant brands are…probably not going to come to any of our shows.
    Unless Tila Tequila is reading this.

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