Last week Twitter announced with great fanfare that 150+ million tweets a day are now being sent out.   Even so, the micro-blogging is still much smaller than Facebook.

When it comes to registered users, Facebook has 600+ million compared to 190 million Twitter accounts.   And those 190 million accounts probably only translate into 20 million odd human beings (see earlier post).

However, despite being smaller there is evidence that Twitter is a more effective medium for brands based on a number of stats that came out of the recent Ad Age Digital conference:

First of all at the conference, Twitter’s Adam Bain mentioned that 67% of users said they would make a purchase from a follower, compared to 51% of Facebook users (via Paid Content).   None of the coverage actually quotes the source of that stat, so here it is, via an infographic from Digital Surgeons (click on the image for the full version) – as it was produced at the end of last year, the no of total users is obviously out of date.

Secondly, Twitter brand campaigns get a much better response rate.   A number of recent blog posts and articles have questioned the effectiveness of Facebook in drumming up sales.  For example. analyst group Forrester gave Facebook a 1% click through and a 2% conversion rate.

Twitter by comparison does much better – a click through rate of 3-5%.  And according to Twitter, a new dashboard providing data on how people are responding to tweets (and so gives intelligence about how to change tack if necessary) drove 65 million impressions and an engagement score of 8.8% when US electronics retailer Radio Shack tried it out when it sponsored a trending topic. (to put that into context, the average an average Internet ad has a CTR of 0.2%)

Of course, Twitter campaigns aren’t cheap.   A sponsored trending topic will cost you $100,000+ according to Mashable.   Still a bargain compared to what a comparable ad campaign would get you, but not in the eyes of some marketing directors where social media is still seen as (much like traditional PR used to be) a low cost form of advertising dressed up with a few hackneyed phrases like ‘join the conversation’ for good effect.

And there might lie the problem.   Facebook ticks off two boxes.   It squarely answers the question of ‘are my customers using it’ – almost certainly yes.   And it’s possible to get started with a relatively modest investment.  A perfect vehicle to see if social media can help you sell more stuff.

Gawker’s take on the Forrester Facebook report is as follows:  “Nobody actually likes your brand’s stupid Facebook page“:

“The main problem is that Facebook treats brands a lot like people. So when you “like” a brand’s Facebook page, your newsfeed fills up with corporate adspeak, drowning out important news of what childhood friends’ babies are up to and resulting in an uneasy sense of foreboding….as one researcher told the Wall Street Journal: “You go to Facebook to find other people, not to find a product.”

A bit harsh?  Of course, some brands are using Facebook very well.  But at the same time, look at how Britain’s major retailers use social media.   The fact that the vast majority have social media feeds but few respond to customer comments tells you a lot about the thinking that is behind their existence.

Related articles

• Study shows major UK retailers unresponsive on social media, only 1/4 responded to tweets (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Twitter Considering Facebook-Style Pages for Brands [REPORT] (mashable.com)
• Laziness: The Facebook Brand Page Killer (blogs.forbes.com)
• Social Media Influences Website Traffic Indirectly (informationweek.com)

An excellent infographic (thanks Comscore Data Mine!) about online newspaper reading habits.   It clearly shows two things – reading online newspapers is at a peak mid-day, so when people are in the office.

Some of that will be people checking out the football scores while at work, though arguably a proportion will also come from people who need to access online papers for the day jobs (e.g. a lot of FT online subscriptions are paid for by employers as expenses)

Secondly, the % of newspaper reading that happens by phone is very low – 2%.   That could reflect the fact that not all papers are optimised for mobile use, and also the fact that only 1/4 of us in Europe have smartphones, which you need to make online newspaper reading a reasonable experience.   As for iPads…needless to say reflecting its (still) niche status, it has less than 1% of overall views.

Related articles

• Why French youth are reading newspapers (guardian.co.uk)
• Paywalls and the problem of competition (onemanandhisblog.com)

This is a point that’s been made countless times, for example by Ofcom in the UK and Pew Research in the US – people who regularly consume traditional media are older, often 55+.

Harris Interactive (via Marketing Charts) carried out research for the Wall Street Journal about US media consumption habits.   Two stats that could be contradictory:   67% said “I prefer to get my news in more traditional ways”, while 50% said “I tend to get almost all my news online.”

However, I guess the key word is ‘prefer.’   Consumers may want their news from a newspaper or TV programme, but often they’ve switched into a routine which means that’s not actually happening.

And the key differences by age?   81% of the over 55s prefer to get their news via traditional media compared to 57% of the under 35s.   And while only a third (that many?) of the over 55s get their regular news diet online, for the under 35s that jumps to 65%.

Related articles

• Troubles for Traditional Media – Both Print and Television (prnewswire.com)
• Why You Need Social Media and Traditional Media to be successful (socialmediatoday.com)
• OJR: Why traditional journalists join the online ‘bandwagon’ (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

When it comes to the decline of print media, the US is slightly ahead of curve compared to the UK, with the two countries occupying the number one and two spots in earlier OECD research about the decline of newspapers.

As a result, it’s interesting to note a milestone from the US.   A study by Journalistics shows that the NY Times has become the 1st major newspaper to have more Twitter followers than print subscribers (2,668,948 vs 951,000)

That stat has attracted a fair amount of attention, but it’s of course as much testament to the New York Times’ successful online strategy as it is to the state of the newspaper market.

And the UK?  According to the Wallblog, so far every UK newspaper has a Twitter following far below its print subscription, with the FT coming closest (216k Twitter followers @financialtimes vs 390k print buyers)

FT’s iPad app makes £1 million

The Financial Times might not yet be more popular on Twitter than in print, but it is on the iPad, where 400,000 people have downloaded the application.

According to the paper’s deputy chief executive Ben Hughes, it has also netted £1 million in advertising revenue since May.

Separately, Nielsen found that 91% of iPad owners have downloaded applications (correcting an earlier story that 32% didn’t download an app), with games, books and music being the most popular categories.

Related articles

• NY Times Finally Releases a Real iPad App (cultofmac.com)
• The secret to The Financial Times’ iPad success (econsultancy.com)
• The Digital Newspaper: Hands-On with 4 Top iPad Apps (mashable.com)
• Is the iPad Really the Savior of the Newspaper Industry? (mashable.com)

Following Rupert Murdoch‘s comment that he might in future hide his news sites from Google, there’s obviously been a fair amount of discussion about it.  Ben Kunz’s take on the issue, including a look at how Sony manages to give away free content AND shift inventory is worth a read.

However, the obvious question is, could this become something of an own goal? Answers from Hitwise and Alexa say quite possibly yes.

Hitwise looked at Murdoch’s flagship US title, The Wall Street Journal, and found that both Google and Google News are the top traffic drivers.  More importantly, Google is responsible for driving new readers Murdoch’s way – with over 44% of Google traffic coming from people who haven’t visited the WSJ in the past 30 days.

That last point is important – with 88% of newspaper reading time happening in print (note – reading time, not actual readers), the way we consume online media is, outside a community of news nerds, such as myself, very different.

The other month, UK media blogger Malcolm Coles looked at the online editions of the UK national newspapers and found that over 6/10 readers only read a single page, or article, and leave again. The conclusion is that there is less brand loyalty online for news.  We search for what we look for, we consume it, and we quickly move onto doing something else.  And if we encounter a paywall, we can easily find that content for free somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal at least does have a core of – paying – readers.  Looking at the UK tabloid, The Sun, Google is responsible for close to 20% of ‘upstream’ visits to the site according to Alexa. For The Times (see image below), that figure increases to over a quarter.

Given this much more single-minded way we now consume news, it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s sites fare if he does pull them away from search. From the evidence, if he really goes ahead with it, he might have to do an about turn very quickly.

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• Google: Rupert Murdoch can block us if he wants to (telegraph.co.uk)
• News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google (news.sky.com)
• If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic (techcrunch.com)