A Measure of Relevancy: Twitter Wins
Monday, August 3, 2009
Video links shared on Twitter are more relevant on average than video links shared on Facebook or Digg.
According to this report from video monitoring site TubeMogul, people who follow links from Twitter to watch video, find those videos to be more relevant to their interests than people who are clicking on video links shared by their Facebook friends or the ones they find on Digg.
A little surprising with how much importance we place on the sacred social graph. If we compared how well we know our connection across these three sites, Facebook would probably host the closest relationships, followed by Twitter, then Digg. So why does Twitter deliver more wanted content?
The conclusion that I'm taking away from this is that a network of relationships built primarily on information shared, and only secondarily on personal relationships to the other people, is a more potent information sharing network.
According to this report from video monitoring site TubeMogul, people who follow links from Twitter to watch video, find those videos to be more relevant to their interests than people who are clicking on video links shared by their Facebook friends or the ones they find on Digg.
A little surprising with how much importance we place on the sacred social graph. If we compared how well we know our connection across these three sites, Facebook would probably host the closest relationships, followed by Twitter, then Digg. So why does Twitter deliver more wanted content?
The conclusion that I'm taking away from this is that a network of relationships built primarily on information shared, and only secondarily on personal relationships to the other people, is a more potent information sharing network.
7 Comments:
Interesting.
I know that the folks at a very large, very popular content aggregation site recently reported to me (on an anecdotal level, but based on their measurements) that when it comes to spreading content, Facebook is a far larger engine than Twitter.
We hypothesized that it was the format of the spreading "vehicle" that made the difference: in Twitter, you get a shortened URL, with introduction at the discretion of the author. In Facebook, you get the site name, a thumbnail, a suggested description and an annotation from your friend.
The difference between spreadability and stickiness is interesting, and I wonder if the aforementioned yet nameless site would echo these findings.
Nice find.
- Clay
i think that twitter works more as a 'live streaming of things' than any other platform. and the mechanism of the opt-in 'following' to each peer only increases the relative relevance of the content (or our commitment to it).
Thanks for sharing that. What I'd like to see (if the pollsters are listening) is the study broken down by what platforms have the best comparative relevancy for sharing business video vs. news video vs. personal/fun video links etc., rather than all video links in aggregate. From a marketer's perspective that would be most valuable.
Nice Mike!
How about that...uhm...your "extended friends" links from facebook is less relevant than links from people you find more interesting for one reason or another. In our business, it seems obvious.
For people working, say as a plumber. They might follow people who either are their reason for an interest i.e Sonic Youth or people who share the same passion for i.e miniature bottles.
Not that surprising when you think on it a bit...
Having gone to high school with someone does not really ensure a whole lot of commonality of interest.
But Twitter is all about finding commonality of interest. Particularly as used right now, where I'd guess a large percentage of users have very few real world friends on the site.
Great stat though- thanks for sharing.
It's an interesting find, definitely. But -2 pts overreaching the definition using the word "relevancy".
Do they know for sure that videos shared via Twitter aren't simply longer, on average? Or maybe the reverse, that they're all closer to 2:00, and that people will more likely sit through an entire video if it's not 45:00. Or maybe the Venn diagram of Twitter users & avid video consumers is very close.
There are holes in the term, through the Scientific Method lens. But the stat itself is a great find.
Nice find.
I think we can agree that a lot of our "friends" on Facebook aren't close connections, and if that's the case, we'll only value a small % of the links share by our core group.
Twitter's a different animal. I use it primarily for professional purposes (learning/connecting w/ peers in Marketing/Advertising), so I don't want people clogging up my Twitter stream with irrelevant posts.
In a sense, Twitter works as a 2nd RSS feed for me, so chances are if I'm following someone it's b/c I'm expecting value from the links they share.
I don't know about anyone else, but I also have very little overlap between my Twitter and Facebook contacts.
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