Facebook Whips Twitter In Terms Of Social Engagement For Companies

As 2013 begins, one question companies should ask is what social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to should use to engage people.

According to a recent report from Spredfast, the answer is Facebook as companies engage customers more when using the social network.

How much more? Nearly 10 times more, Spredfast’s 2012 Social Engagement Index Benchmark reveals.
In the social media management company’s report, it examined internal and external social engagement of 154 large companies.

According to the social media management firm, the average number of social accounts a company manages is a staggering 51 accounts. The average social users of a company was tallied at 29 and 11 is the average number of company groups active in social.

Just as people have flocked to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the report discovered that companies are running more and more social accounts using more and more social users from inside their organizations.

The average total engagement is at 2 million where Facebook has 1.9 million and Twitter has 95 thousand.
Engagement, the company computes, is E = Lk + Rt + Cm + Mn + Etc. where Lk is likes, Rt is retweets, Cm is comments and Mn is mentions.

As it stands, the average number of interactions for each activity published through social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are at 549 and 60 respectively.

Not that companies as using Twitter less than Facebook. In fact, it is the opposite. Twitter is being used more by companies.

The Spredfast report notes the following data for Average Company Activity:

Twitter

Day	50
Week	376
Month	1502
Quarter	4508

Facebook

Day	16
Week	115
Month	49
Quarter	1484

LinkedIn:

Day	1
Week	7
Month	31
Quarter	93

As you can see, companies have more than three times more activity on Twitter than on Facebook.
The picture changes, however, when it comes to network size.

According to Spredfast, the average network size for a company on Facebook is 1.6 million fans with Twitter averaging 183 thousand followers and LinkedIn averaging 7 thousand connections.

This is where the difference in engagement may have tipped towards Facebook as more users means more people who will engage activity whether by liking, commenting or sharing.

Because of these efforts, Spredfast says that the average total reach per quarter for companies using social media and sites like Facebook and Twitter is now at 47 million per quarter.

The company defines reach as the potential number of social impressions a firm reached through social activities. It calculated this using the formula R = A(N) + S (n) where A is activity, N is the size of a particular firm’s network, S is the number of shares by that network and n is the number people in the sharer’s network.

Nonetheless, it will not hurt if companies do have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts at the same time. The more the merrier, they say, though it still comes down to effective use of these tools.



Courtesy of Social Media Today: http://ow.ly/hV6Pc