What Do Marketers Want: Facebook or Twitter?

RMN Digital | October 29, 2013 | Americas, Corporate, Regions, Social, Social Media, Strategy | No Comments

Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) released Monday its first annual Social Media Intelligence report examining paid, earned and owned social media trends.

Key findings of the Adobe Digital Index report show Twitter and Pinterest with the biggest, year-over-year (YoY) jump in revenue per visitor (RPV) with Twitter experiencing 300 percent growth.

Facebook’s Cost-per-Click (CPC) decreased by 40 percent while Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and advertising ROI increased by 275 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

The data also shows that Facebook still dominates the share of social referral traffic to retail sites, but Twitter’s share grew the strongest with 258 percent YoY.

[ “The social media companies (Facebook, Twitter) are in a test-and-learn phase to better understand how people want to interact with brand messages and content in the social space.” – Said VivaKi CEO Frank Voris in a recent interview with RMN Digital. Click here to read the article. ]

The analysis of the latest Social trends is based on aggregated and anonymous data across retail, media, entertainment, and travel websites over the last twelve months.

[ Also Read: 15 Essential Areas of Digital Marketing ]

According to Adobe, the data represents 131 billion Facebook ad impressions, 400 million unique visitors to social networking sites, more than 1 billion Facebook posts, and 4.3 billion social engagements on Facebook including comments, shares and likes. Paid social data is based on data from customers using Adobe Marketing Cloud.

[ Also Read: Mr. Mark, I Am Fed Up with Your Facebook ]

“Social media is rapidly maturing as a marketing channel, bolstered by the steps Facebook and Twitter have taken to make their audiences more accessible to marketers,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Digital Index, Adobe.

“Recognizing the opportunity, marketers are optimizing their campaigns for social channels, and as a result consumers are now using social media much more in their purchasing process. We expect this trend to accelerate during the holiday season.”

[ Also Read: Digital Marketing Simplified – Secrets of Social Media ]

Additional Adobe findings include:

Paid Social Trends: Facebook is becoming increasingly attractive to brand marketers with ad click volume up by 29 percent YoY. In addition, ad impressions grew by 85 percent YoY and cost per thousand impressions of an ad (CPM) increased by 120 percent.
Owned Social Trends: Revenue per Visit (RPV) rose YoY illustrating an increase in value for social media marketing. RPV grew 39 percent for Facebook, 300 percent for Twitter and 150 percent for Pinterest. Facebook is still the leader for social referrals to retail sites, but Facebook’s share in referral traffic is down 20 percent from 77 percent in 2012 while the share for Twitter and Pinterest increased by 258 percent and 84 percent, respectively.
Earned Social Trends: Social engagement on Facebook grew by 115 percent while the number of brand postings increased by 9 percent YoY. Brand posts containing an image produced an engagement rate 600 percent higher than text-based posts. In addition, Tumblr earned the most positive sentiment of all social platforms.

Adobe Digital Index publishes research on digital marketing and other topics of interest to senior marketing and e-commerce executives across industries.