A new report from WordStream compares the ad performance from Twitter and Facebook. Choosing which of these two social giants to dump your marketing dollars can be a difficult choice for anyone, but getting it right is essential. The report digs into some detailed information in four important categories, which are:
- Network Reach (how many people will actually see your ads)
- Ad Performance (will your ad dollars drive positive results)
- Mobile Ad Performance
- Ad Formats (which site offers the best options for your business)
Some of the information provided in the report was not surprising, such as their information about the network reach of the two sites. Facebook has 1.15 billion active users, sharing 4.75 billion items per day. Twitter has 232 million active users posting 500 million tweets per day. Anyone who follows these two social networks will be familiar with these numbers, but it is still nice to see in a well formatted report. In this section, WordStream gave Facebook an A+ and Twitter a B.
The report goes on to discuss Ad Performance and Mobile Ad Performance, which are two areas where many marketers might not have quite as much information as they should. The report does a great job of compiling information from a variety of sources, and listing it in an easy to understand way. Their infogrpahic shows that the average CPM for Facebook is $.59 compared to $3.50 for Twitter. Quite a difference! Another thing that popped out at me was that in several sections, Twitter doesn’t publish data (Average CPC, Mobile CPC and ROI). I’m a big fan of using data to drive decision making, so I wasn’t happy to see that from Twitter.
When it comes to mobile ad performance, it seems that Facebook is dominating based on pure numbers, but Twitter’s expected growth in this area is quite impressive. According to the report, they will net up to $1.33 Billion in worldwide ad revenue by 2015, and about 60% of that will come from mobile. Facebook’s mobile ad growth isn’t likely to be as significant during the next 12 months.
Finally, in terms of ad formats, Facebook offers 10 ad formatting options, compared to Twitter’s three. Facebook actually dropped the number of formats they offered because of users complaining that there were too many to choose from, so in this case, more is not necessarily better. In addition, they found several of the Facebook formats do not perform well (or at all) so their larger selection is not really a perk for users.
Overall, the report suggested that neither Twitter nor Facebook is a great advertising option for lead generation. If you are sure you want to market on one of the social giants, they do say that Facebook has a slight edge over Twitter.
