Twitter is Better for Business than Facebook – Says Abrams Research Social Media Survey

By Kyle Austin

February 18th, 2009

Abrams Research, a media consultancy launched last November by Dan Abrams (NBC’s former Chief Legal Analyst), released the findings of their first social media survey today (Although they didn’t utilize a social media release).

The survey, conducted last week (during “Social Media Week”), was given to 200 social media leaders from across the U.S. and Canada – including founders, bloggers, journalists, entrepreneurs and members of the Twitterati – to see what they thought about the future of social media.

When asked the hypothetical question “What social media service would you advise a business pay for?” – 39.6% of respondents indicated that they would advise businesses to pay for Twitter. 21% of respondents indicated that they would say LinkedIn, while only 15.3% said Facebook.

Those results were very different from how respondents answered when looking at the question as an individual user – “Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?”

• Facebook 32.2%
• Linkedin 29.7%
• Twitter 21.8%
• YouTube 13.4%
• MySpace 1.5%
• Digg 1.5%

With none of these companies currently charging for their services (at least in a social media regard) the answers are pretty fluffy, but the results seem to spotlight some of the real business benefits that social media advisers and corporations are finding on Twitter.

Specific responses included:

• “Twitter is the easiest way to communicate, connect, and drive a call to action.”
• “Twitter – Instantaneous feedback from and interaction with customers/users.”
• “Twitter – The ability to broadcast and give a business a ‘voice’ is powerful marketing.”
• “Twitter – It’s the quickest way I’ve seen to spread information virally to a wide scope of people attached in a lot of random ways”

The survey also asked respondents:

“Which corporation has done the best job of using social media?”

Respondents were asked to choose one; these were the most popular choices, ranked accordingly:

1. Zappos
2. Obama (campaign and presidency)
3. CNN
4. Comcast (“Comcast Cares”)
5. Jetblue
6. Dell
7. Burger King
8. NPR
9. New York Times
10. Ford

The list seems pretty close to other top-ten lists we’ve seen for social media, although Starbucks and IBM were noticeably absent. What are your thoughts on AR’s top-ten and some of their purely speculative questioning?

Entry Filed under: Digital media relations