A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter.
While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. The results are dramatic – mentions of the content of this blog on Twitter generally fall around 20 or so mentions per post. Facebook, however, is lucky to get one or two likes or shares per post.
While many factors may explain this discrepancy, I suspect that the most reasonable explanation is the differences in social context between the two networks. Content must fit the context of the environment or it feels out of place and awkward, even if the participants are similar.
(as part of this post, I should mention that HubSpot’s Blog Grader does a wonderful job of tallying all the Tweets/Shares/Likes for a blog)
Does this match with your experience of B2B content on Facebook?
Steve, thanks for sharing the results of your test.
My feeling has been that Twitter and LinkedIn had greater affinity for business people. So on this community, we feature those two share widgets.
But with the growth of Facebook and the new “like” widget, I’ve been wondering if we should try it. Maybe we will, but expect Twitter will continue to be the favorite because it’s quick and easy and fits with business users better.
Twitter seems like a better companion for bloggers; it is microblogging after all. And LinkedIn is almost a competitor to blogging, with its discussion groups. Likewise Facebook is trying to be many different things.
Hard to see how Twitter will monetize itself, but for now it’s a simple and powerful way to spread the word about a piece of B2B content. It may not be as big as Facebook, but Twitter is big enough. Now let’s hope it’s around for the long term!
Bob,
That very much agrees with our experience – Facebook is a good experiment, but we generally don’t see the sharing there in that one does in other networks – for business content.
What will be *really* interesting to watch is whether B2B content writers begin to have more “fun” (great piece from Ann Handley on the topic http://www.contentrulesbook.com/2010/07/living-by-the-content-rules-have-some-fun/) and if so, whether those begin to be more shareable on Facebook.
Steve