Let’s say you build a website or blog and you don’t possess the greenest of thumbs to build a glorious garden of visitors to your creation. You look around for references, you hope to grow your social e-presence like TechCrunch or Gizmodo (aim for the stars and you’ll land on the moon). You read a post and inevitably see this :

Now, we hear that Facebook’s userbase is a whopping 300 million versus Twitter’s userbase of 13 million. Not utilizing these numbers would just be ignoring the pot(s) of gold sitting in front of you. Then the question is, how do you know the percentage of users clicking on the content link that you personally (and painstakingly) share with them? Is your audience more inclined to clicking on the Facebook link or the Twitter link? I mean with the vast difference in userbase, wouldn’t the answer obvious?

ShareThis, one of the most used social sharing widget, has kindly given us an answer :

According to Labnol.org, they believe that Twitter users tend to click on the shared link more because with availability of URL shorteners (bit.ly, goo.gl, fb.me), not much of a description is given with the lack of title in a link. Curiosity lures the cats, and more users click to find out about the content. This makes sense, I myself do that often, I scroll through my Twitterfeed and end up with multiple tabs in my browser.

Whether I continue to read these articles though, is another thing altogether. I view the title, and sometimes just end up closing it anyway (sometimes our tired eyes just need this selective viewing process, right?)

Which ties in with the results from the next table :

What happens after the landing page?

Facebook users do end up exploring your site in greater detail, in numbers, a visitor from Twitter will check 1.66 pages on your site (average) while a Facebook user will spend more time checking out 2.76 pages.

Interesting.

So the next time you choose to “Share This”, think about which is more important to you; luring the visitors to your site, or having your visitors discover the richness of your content?