Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Twitter vs. ...

It's a good week for conferences, if you're searching for the future of Health 2.0.  I had a chance to meet in person yesterday with some of healthcare's leading digital luminaries at an evening Tweetup after Day 1 of the Digital Pharma Conference in Bridgewater, NJ.  On the West Coast, the popular Web 2.0 Summit is drawing large crowds including the CEOs of Federated Media, Paypal and Twitter.

Evan Williams, Twitter's chief, was questioned about his young platform’s growth, plans for revenue, and not surprisingly, how he sees Facebook.  According to Mashable: "Evan discussed the increasing role of Facebook as a competitor to Twitter, but summed it up with this: 'The world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter.'"

Or is it?  Back in Bridgewater, the chatter I heard among pharma marketers was clearly bent toward Twitter, and conference speakers seemed to share their passion.  In fact if you searched all the tweets attendees have posted to date about Digital Pharma speakers and topics, you’d find that “Facebook” appears in only 32 tweets.  “Twitter” appears in 90. (updated 10.22)

Of course the argument is moot without taking e-patients into account.  These are the very consumers that Digital Pharma attendees are hoping to study, analyze and understand.  You could argue that one measure of Facebook or Twitter engagement is the number of fans or followers collected by an individual or organization.  Looking at a select few advocacy groups – the best-known associations of patients with given diseases – a story begins to emerge:

Advocacy	Facebook Fans	Twitter Followers
American Diabetes Assoc.	12,708	1,933
American Cancer Assoc.	166,657	14,099
Natl. Multiple Sclerosis Society	17,999	1,670
Susan G. Komen for the Cure	113,532	9,975
Natl. Kidney Foundation	6,066	832

 

Hold on … let’s put this into perspective before crowning Facebook the leader.  After all, Facebook is older and larger than Twitter, so advocacy fan pages have had more time and eyeballs to work with.  According to comScore, Facebook averaged 92 million unique visitors during the month of August 2009, compared with just under 21 million for Twitter … which means we ought to weight our comparison before drawing a conclusion.  What would the advocacies look like then, if their Twitter feeds had 4 times as many potential followers?            

 

Advocacy	Facebook Fans	Twitter Followers*
American Diabetes Assoc.	12,708	8,563
American Cancer Assoc.	166,657	62,458
Natl. Multiple Sclerosis Society	17,999	7,398
Susan G. Komen for the Cure	113,532	44,189
Natl. Kidney Foundation	6,066	3,685

*weighted

 

When one (tiny) measure of social media influence is controlled for in one (exceedingly simple) way, the gap between Facebook and Twitter appears to close – particularly for those advocacies that arrived recently to the social networking scene.

On the other hand, to truly gauge Facebook vs. Twitter, you need to understand the influence and impact of thousands of grassroots fan pages and feeds, created and passionately updated by e-patients themselves.  Only within that complex and fascinating ecosystem will true healthcare insights from both social platforms eventually come to light.

-Jeff

Comments

[Kevin at e-Patient Connections]

Jeff,

Wow, great post. Really interesting way to compare FB and Twitter and possible over emphasis on the latter. Hope we can all continue to share out what seems to work, and not, on both platforms.

Great meeting you at the tweetup btw.

Kevin