Twitter Catching Facebook in Total Actively Engaged Audience, and Other Observations

The nice people at DigitalSurgeons.com put out an infographic back in October showing a comparison of Twitter and Facebook use (and it was just called to my attention).  With the holidays upon us and the number of people helping their friends and cousins sign up for Facebook, I wanted to focus on some of these numbers as they stand today, or as they were at the beginning of this quarter.  The graphic shows some interesting things about use of these platforms.

The fact is, while these two platforms are the dominant players when we look at social media, they are still relatively new, and the way people use them, how they use them, why they use them and where they use them continues to evolve.  Here are a few of my take-aways:

1)    I swear I saw a stat over the past year or so that said 80 percent of people update their Twitter accounts via mobile.  So, generally, the mobile numbers, while still significant, seem a little low to me.  And, with the continued climb in smart phone adoption, we’re likely to see these numbers climb.

2)   
In the “Brand followers will purchase that specific brand” category.  I wonder if there isn’t an element of “have purchased that specific brand” and what are the motivations for following that brand on Facebook.  It would be interesting to see a break-out on the percentages.  I wonder if part of that category (although small) is a result of people turning to social media for customer service questions.  As more companies integrate customer service into these channels, those numbers will likely climb.

3)  And, most interesting to me, when you look at the “Update their status every day” category, while Facebook has more users, there are almost as many people who are active on Twitter everyday as there are on Facebook. (55 MM for Twitter, 60 MM for Facebook) This is balanced, however with the “Login everyday” category where Facebook as 205 MM daily logins vs Twitter’s 29 MM.  The argument to all of this is that people use the platforms differently.  But, do the numbers mean that Twitter is a more active channel and Facebook is a more passive one?  If so, does that impact your marketing approach?

Now that we’re all gathering for the holidays, we’ll start to see these numbers climb again.  Anything else pop out at you in the numbers? Anything I missed?

Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician. And, I wasn’t a math major, so feel free to check my numbers.