Twitter and Facebook by the numbers

Now we all know that Facebook and Twitter are two of the most recognizable social networks, but are their numbers of users really telling the whole story?  In all fairness, The New Radar focuses mainly on mobile/text marketing platforms, so this may be slightly biased toward mobile platforms, but when you sit back and think about it, what gives you the best chance at actually reaching people? As a marketing company we look at numbers and stats a lot to see what is the most effective way of communicating with our users and supporters.

The inspiration for this post comes from from Jay Baer’s article “Is Twitter Massively Overrated?” , which at the time of writing this article, has 891 tweets vs. 145 Facebook “likes” and 61 Facebook “shares”.   Go figure.  In the article Baer gives some stats from  about Twitter usage versus other forms of media.  Granted, the survey group is going to be biased due to the demographic of the people that participate in the survey (probably not the demographic we are trying to reach), but based on a another article on Times Tech blog “How Many People Are Really Tweeting” , the numbers are staggering.

According to Time, “Using data from March, it’s been established that out of 175 million registered users, 90 million have zero followers, and 56 million follow no one at all. And 56 million follow more than eight other Twitter accounts, while just 36 million follow 16 or more people on the service.

If the Facebook baseline metric of 10 or more friends convincing a user to keep an account active is applied, Twitter’s active user base plummets from the official 175 million total figure to somewhere between 36 and 56 million. Still nothing to sneeze at, but perhaps Twitter should adjust their boast to something a bit closer to the truth.”

Social Media Usage Stats by Edison Research and Arbitron.

Not in the article, but in a reply, I think Jay was right on in with his assessment of the actual interaction difference with Facebook and Twitter.

Baer says, “I think technically Facebook has like 5 years head start on Twitter, but 2 years as a “public” network. Indeed, Twitter is much easier for search and discovery. But, does that make it a “social network”? How many of your Twitter followers do you actually know? Twitter is becoming the world’s shortest magazine, with Facebook providing a measure of personal interaction (and many more features) that Twitter is rapidly losing.”

So we took a look at some facebook stats and found that (according to facebook), Facebook has: