Case Study: Do Twitter retweets or Facebook likes/shares generate more traffic?

1 point

15 years ago

We run http://FanPageList.com/ and were excited to see that our friends at the WWE tweeted about John Cena's ranking on our Top Athletes on Facebook list: http://twitter.com/#!/WWE/status/45537384107999233

The @WWE Twitter account has about 250K followers so we fully expected to receive a big boost in traffic which we did (had over 350+ concurrent users at the peak). What we didn't expect was Facebook generated about 6X more traffic to fanpagelist.com than Twitter:

Looking at our Clicky Dashboard using their Social Media Traffic Source report for yesterday, fanpagelist.com received:

3,851 visitors from facebook.com 662 visitors from twitter.com

Checking our Facebook Insights dashboard, we saw 1.3 Million Share Story impressions yesterday. Share story impressions according to Insights are "The number of times people viewed stories generated from organic shares"

Compare that was 107,043 Twitter impressions using TweetReach, (http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=fanpagelist.com), over the most recent 50 retweets. This isn't a complete comparison since there were about 120 retweets yesterday about fanpagelist.com but gives you an idea of how Facebook drives more traffic than Twitter.

We have both a Share button on my pages and Like button (via the Wibiya toolbar) but we think the fact that Facebook Likes now have better visibility in News Feeds probably did help boost traffic: http://mashable.com/2011/02/27/facebook-like-button-takes-over-share-button-functionality/

We wanted to blog about this and show nice and pretty graphs but it was faster to write-up a quick post to share with HN readers.

Fan Page List team @fanpagelist

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