3 facts about Twitter versus Facebook

Home 3 facts about Twitter versus Facebook

When we started with our ‘Social Media around the World’ study, we had a few hypotheses about Facebook and Twitter. We’re happy to share these hypotheses and the answers we found.

H1. Heavy Twitter users will decrease their Facebook usage.

We were wrong about this one. Let’s first look at the population. Only 13% of the social network users is not using Facebook and not using Twitter. Only 2% is Twitter only. 19% of the social network users are using Twitter and Facebook. We thought that heavy Twitter users would decrease their time spend on Facebook, but this is not the case. The conclusion is very simple: the more memberships on social networks you have, the more time you spend on each of these sites. People with a Facebook and a Twitter account are just more into social media than Facebook only people.

Networks Facebook Twitter male female

H2. Twitter is more a male thing, Facebook more a female.

This one is true. The adoption of Facebook is higher among women than men. On Twitter it is the other way around. Next to that, the average age on Twitter is lower. Twitter has a overall adoption rate of 16% versus Facebook 62%. The profile of the Twitter user is still that of the early adopter, whereas Facebook has the profile of the mainstream population.

Male vs female social network platforms

H3. People spend more time on Facebook than on Twitter

This one was confirmed as well. On average, people spend 37 minutes per day on Facebook, versus 21 minutes on Twitter. Most people have more friends than followers and have more interactions on Facebook. The social network site with the most intensive users is the Eastern European Vkontakte. On average, their users spend 49 minutes a day on this site.
Connection time social media platforms

The full report of our global social media study is still available on SlideShare.

[slideshare id=9249498&doc=socialmediaaroundtheworld2011-110914000406-phpapp01]