Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Is B2B Content "Likeable"?


With all the discussion about Facebook's new "Like" (or "Recommend") button for the web, I thought it would be worthwhile running a small experiment to answer the following question:

Do the readers of B2B content share more on Twitter or Facebook?

I will admit that I have certain biases, and I don't think that the human brain is very well adapted to truly merging business and social relationships as I wrote previously. However, in the interest of science, I thought the experiment was worthwhile.

I have reduced the automatic "sharing" options on each post to two - one that shares on Facebook, and one that shares on Twitter. I have historically been sharing content only on Twitter, so it has a bit of an advantage, so in order to somewhat compensate for that, I have added the Facebook sharing bar to the top of the post.

I could be proven wrong, but I suspect that, when I tally the counts a month or so from now, we'll see very little activity on Facebook in comparison to Twitter.

What have you seen for B2B content? Does it become shareable on Facebook?
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4 comments:

Jeremy Victor said...

Steve,

It is an excellent experiment in the now. Curious to see your findings, though I do believe you will be correct in more shares via Twitter.

That said, where my mind continues to go when I think of Facebook and the social graph is: 450 million users and growing.

While the Twitter stream seems to be the default now, another interesting experiment may be to see at what rate the "likes" increase or decrease per month over time.

Steven Woods said...

Jeremy,
I think we're of similar mind on that. I am not convinced that Twitter can be with us for the long run (any attempts to generate revenue will cause a fairly fundamental change in Twitter).

Where the "update/discovery of topic of interest" moves to (most Tweets from business seem to be in this category) is unclear.

Russell Palmer said...

My feeling is that if there were a Linkedin.com "Like" button that that would be used far more for B2B content than facebook. Perhaps not so much as twitter because twitter is more thow-away due to the real-time nature of the timelines and the asynchronous network structure. That means that it's easier to retweet and with with less implications for your carefully chosen personal network.

Steven Woods said...

Russell,
That I would agree with - I think that LinkedIn is very much more of a fit with the business environment, so might overcome the personal/business divide in a way that Facebook never can.

I haven't seen as fast and aggressive moves out of LinkedIn, unfortunately.

Steve