You visit Google because you have a need – a need for information or a product and any salesman will tell you that if you identify the need you’re half way to selling a customer a solution. That’s what Google does – it offers solutions; advertisers pay to be seen as the solution providers – visitors come to click on their ads. Everybody wins; visitors fill a need, vendors sell a product, Google makes ad revenue ($36.5bn in 2011). As more advertisers enter the market they out bid each other forcing the click price up for advertisers, giving Google even more revenue… and that will continue for the foreseeable future (despite a surprise 8 per cent decline in the average cost per click in 2011).

You visit Facebook because… well why do you visit Facebook? Boredom? At a lose end? Usually I’m in a queue or about to snuggle up in bed and am curious to see what my friends (past and present) are up to. See a sales model there? Nope – which is why Facebook are trying to persuade the business world that ‘Facebook users influence each other’s buying decisions’. It’s true that they could of course, but I rarely see it on Facebook; you’d have to assume that people either already had a need for that recommended product and needed a nudge, or were holding spare cash and were easily persuaded to change their ‘Facebook boredom’ mindset to a ‘I need to buy something’ one.

That puts Facebook in the same place as most media companies – ad space as a distraction from looking at something else – they sell ads based on demographics because their readers are ‘the target audience’ but distraction banners average a ‘click through’ of 0.2% whereas Google’s ‘need targeted’ sponsored ads are at least ten times that and usually much more.

All I really check on Facebook now is my newsfeed and for the most part news feed updates that I see are either:

• Comment on breaking news / music / memories
• Comment on the weather
• Comment on kids and pets
• Photos of nights out / weddings
• Funny pictures (most of which stopped being funny via email years ago)
• General moaning (work, in-laws etc.)
• Subtle gloating ‘life doesn’t get much better than this’

As for the status updates from things that I’ve liked (note the tense) – I’ve hidden ALL of those from my feed because they interrupt the flow of miscellaneous trivia being generated by my ‘friends’. I like or liked those companies or products, but I don’t LOVE many of them now… so a promotional post is VERY annoying. Of the Facebook ‘company’ pages that I have been involved with, the ‘Facebook Insights’ data shows that after 3 months most posts are only seen by around 33% of those who originally ‘Liked’ the page (despite the best efforts of all involved). That’s quite telling – if a page says it has 10,000 fans, it’s likely that 6,666 of them have already hidden any communications from their visible Facebook news feed. They took whatever special offer was running to make them ‘Like’, and then blocked out the irrelevant follow-ups… that’s what company promotions are within a social context, they’re irrelevant, and anything else just doesn’t make direct money even if it gets engagement.

Where’s this all leading? Well I have been paying attention for a number of months to web traffic data gathered by Alexa.com (“Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources“.) Alexa shows some interesting trends when comparing Facebook with Google – trends which investors should be aware of.

Firstly as we entered 2012 the number of Facebook visits starting AND ending with a single page view (known as the bounce rate) are gaining and have now matched the same level as Google. This is a worrying sign because Facebook needs ten times as many page views as Google in order to generate the same number of clicks (and ad revenue). At the same time Google’s bounce rate has fallen marginally – suggesting improved repeat search and user experience. Winner? Google.

Secondly between 2010 and 2012 Facebook’s average daily time on site has dropped from around 33 minutes to around 24 minutes. Now 24 minutes is a substantial amount of time per day but it’s 27% less time than was being spent two years ago. Is the decline indicative of visitor apathy? Google’s time on site is largely flat over the same period at 12 minutes per day. Winner? Google.

Thirdly the number of pages being read per day on Facebook is falling – it’s down from 15 per day to 13 per day, for Google the total is largely flat at 12 pages per day. Facebook needs to put a zero on the end of it’s figure to compete on ad revenue. Winner? Google.

Finally from Alexa’s ‘clickstream analysis’ we can see that 8.24% of Facebook visitors are on Google.com before visiting Facebook and 8.24% immediately after visiting Facebook. On the flipside 4.95% of Google’s users are on Facebook before coming to Google, and 4.56% return afterwards. One could also surmise that if 8.24% of Facebook.com users going to Google.com represents only 4.95% of Google’s upstream visits, Google has an ACTIVE user base 66% larger than Facebook. In June 2011, comScore put Google’s worldwide reach at 1 billion unique visitors, if that’s 66% larger than Facebook it puts Facebook’s active monthly account usage at 600 million, not the 800 million frequently quoted in the media. Winner? Google.

So, before we all get carried away with investing in an overpriced Facebook IPO, it’s worth remembering that Google’s share price dropped 10% on the NASDAQ in January because investors were disappointed with their MASSIVE $36.5 billion ad revenue. Given that Facebook ads perform 10 times less effectively on click through than Google’s, the difference in visitor mindset, AND the data they have on me is LESS than what Google have, I wouldn’t ever expect Facebook ad revenue to exceed one tenth of Google’s… and with that in my ‘mindset’ I’m off to buy some shares in Google.

Matt Peskett is Online Marketing Consultant at Firetop  and a Twitter addict (@PensionFunds)

There’s rather a lot of Twitter rhetoric being bandied about in the Web marketing industry these days so naturally a common question that’s been coming from Firetop clients is “Would being on Twitter help our search engine positioning?” and my short answer on this is “Indirectly yes, but nothing momentous“.

In my opinion the biggest SEO benefit of Twitter is in providing a publishing vehicle that you can syndicate onto a website’s home page to provide an element of freshly updated daily content. We’ve known for years that Google weights pages that have daily content on them more favourably than those that stay static for long periods of time, so in this way one might argue that Twitter post syndication helps SEO. However, by the same token you could just as easily change your home page content daily through some other means like a Content Management System.

If you’ve already decided to seriously embrace Twitter for the benefit of marketing to that social medium then of course you may decide to use Tweets on your home page for SEO as it’s really not much extra work to implement (typically). Micro-blogging with 140 characters via Twitter takes almost no time at all versus full article blogging and if fresh content for SEO is your primary goal then it does the job. It’s important to remember though that saying something useful, on topic and of consequence is important on Twitter in order to drive followers who will be seeing your regular Tweets.

Your Twitter followers do provide a potential link building source if they like what you are saying and decide to investigate your main site as a consequence of your mini biog link (which incidentally is one extra back-link). If you are writing blogs you can promote each newly published blog entry via Twitter to your followers, which again means that you might more quickly generate back-links assuming followers are in a similar field and that what you have produced is useful content that they want to promote on their own blogs or ‘Retweet’.

Finally, in addition to the extra biog back-link already mentioned above, your personalised Twitter profile page does provide an opportunity to have an additional Google search result listing – separate to your main website’s. Remember that your Twitter profile name appears at the start of the page’s <title> tag (still the most important tag for SEO in my eyes) so it’s important to make use of the 20 or so <title> characters you use there… within reason! The more useful your Tweets, the more followers you will gain and the more links your profile page might gain – making the back-link you have there more valuable too.

To summarise, all of these small search engine optimisation gains from Twitter are indirect and in my opinion it’s really not worth considering Twitter for commercial gain unless you  intend to fully maximise Your Twitter experience…

DECEMBER 2009 > An update on this topic which all changed with Real Time Search Results!

Great Hitwise article on Twitter about the key uses of Twitter.