I was taking a look earlier today at our Google Analytics report to see how we’re doing in terms of visitors and traffic sources and I think it is safe to say that if you’re running a blog focus on Facebook rather than twitter.
Our referrals from Facebook are more than double the referrals from Twitter even though we have over 1,400 followers on twitter and only 137 fans on our Facebook page. Now here are some reasons as to why (in my opinion):
The nature of Facebook vs. Twitter:
Twitter is great at spreading news but with a large number of followers sometimes things can kind of get cluttered. Also tweeters have a limited canvas to spread an idea or a blog article in our case. On the other hand, posting on Facebook is much more compelling for users to click on. You can add on your own comment as well a brief excerpt about the post and you can even add a thumbnail if you’d like. And from experience posts with thumbnails usually get more clicks. (Just try to add an item on to Dubizzle and you’ll know what I mean.)
User access
A very important factor is how users access both sites, I know I access Twitter almost completely on my phone since it is just more convenient for me. Now as an iPhone user I don’t think that should really matter, but when I had it on my blackberry I used to dread reading articles linked from a tweet because it was a hassle to deal with that tiny screen and the trackball so I ended up ignoring all articles in tweets from the people I followed.
Being active
With regards to interactiveme I believe the difference in traffic is because of our activity levels, I believe that we are not as active in creating a dialouge on Twitter as much as we are on Facebook, but what I don’t understand is the number of followers on twitter keeps growing at a much higher rate than our Facebook fans.
When I started blogging for interactiveme we had around 700 – 800 followers on twitter and I had around 400 friends on my personal Facebook profile and when I shared a post on my wall traffic to the site would increase by a good percentage which led us to is add the “like” button and start a Facebook page.
Summary
What you can take away from this is setup pages on both sites and make sure to add “like” and “tweet” buttons on your site and posts, but I would consider focusing more on your Facebook page rather than twitter, but that does not mean ignoring twitter completely it is still a great source for news and if you manage to get a few influential tweeters following you that could make a huge deal of difference.