Fri 19th of March 2010, filed under Social Media
Social media marketing study published
News is the most popular link category on Facebook and Twitter, while video games are the main focus of MySpace, according to a new report.
Online advertising network Chitika studied a total of 287,090 impressions derived from links on the world's top social media sites, reports Mashable. And it discovered a marked difference in audience intentions between the portals, which will be of interest to many social media marketing professionals. Traffic was split into a number of categories – news, celeb/entertainment, video games, technology, business/law, community, shopping, how-to/DIY, movies and other.
Breaking news from Facebook and Twitter
Perhaps the most surprising discovery was that news accounted for almost half of all click-throughs generated by Twitter (47 per cent). Although it claimed a far smaller percentage of traffic, news was also the largest category on Facebook (28 per cent), followed closely by community (17 per cent) and other (17 per cent). By contrast, video games represented the key traffic-generation sector on MySpace (28 per cent) with celeb/entertainment and other close behind (both 23 per cent).
Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable associate editor, believed that the findings would prove useful for social media marketing experts. "If anything, this data points to the varied interests behind our current obsession with popular social networks," she said. "It's important information for marketers, advertisers and brands hoping to appropriately leverage each site."
Last year, a high-profile report noted a rapid rise in social media marketing adspend. Figures from ad intelligence provider The Nielsen Company found that US companies spent £67.34 million in August 2009, up from just £30.56 million a year earlier.
Posted by Richard Frost
