Twitter vs Facebook, Which Reaches More People

Posted by Nick Schmidt on February 26, 2009 · Comments

Twitter vs Facebook, Which Reaches More People (Title by: Kristin Nicole She wrote a book on “The Twitter Survival Guide”)

A few days ago I was thinking about my followers on Twitter & my friends on Facebook. I have my Twitter posts to automatically update my Facebook status.
I was thinking how many people actually read my tweets on Twitter & Facebook and which service reaches a larger population.

I know everyone on Twitter can see all of my tweets when they log into their account, or they have access to it. However, they have to manually go through each person that they follow to actually read and see my tweet. Most people don’t actually go through multiple pages of all the people that they follow. Unless my tweet is on the 1st page when they log into their account. So I will assume most people read all or skim through all the tweets on their opening page.

Now on Facebook, it depends on the users preference settings of the news feed function. Just like Twitter, my friends on Facebook have access to see all my tweets/status changes if they go to my profile page. However, I assume not everyone goes to my profile page everyday. But, the status change does update on a certain number of people on their news feed.

So my question is how many of my followers on Twitter & my friends on Facebook actually read my tweets/status. So I did a post asking people to reply back that they actually read the tweet/status?

Before the results I want to explain that I didn’t update my tweet/status for 2 days after the initial post.

Well out of my the 387 people who follow me on Twitter, only 5 replied back & 1 sent a direct message, thus a total of 6 people.

On Facebook, out of the 716 friends, 20 of them replied back.

One thing we have to take account is the amount of people who actually read the post on Twitter and Facebook and actually didn’t respond to the post, however there is no tangible evidence of that data. So I don’t know how many people on Twitter actually filtered through their followers and replied, nor do I know how many people on Facebook actually read the news feed on Facebook.

So my next question is, which is more efficient to reach people? Facebook or Twitter?
It looks like Facebook has the ability to reach almost twice the amount of people than on Twitter and Facebook replies are 3 times larger than Twitter.

Does this mean Facebook’s algorithm on the news feed actually reaches more people than Twitter? Or is it that my friends are more interested in me on Facebook than Twitter and that is the reason why they responded back to me on Facebook?

What have you experienced and what are your opinions?

Digg

Share the love