Google & Facebook - The divide & the rope walk !!

Since Facebook users touched 241 million in India (highest in the world) v/s 500 million on Google, digital space in India or any developed market for that matter has turned into, “Thrilla in Manila” where two heavyweights are dominating for the ultimate supremacy. Together with Google & Facebook derive 75% of external referral traffic to any site. Having worked on both the platforms extensively I can very well understand a marketer’s dilemma as to which gives more visibility, which has better reach, where the engagement is more and finally which has a better ROI and where to park your buck!! Do both the platforms work in tandem or are opposing & is there a joining rope which we have to walk.

Content Consumption.

Users on both the platforms have a very different behavior of content consumption, even if the content is same. While on Google any new content has a very rapid growth & decay trajectory Facebook has a slow growth, followed by saturation and gradual decay. In fact, any social media follow what can be termed as, “Rich Gets Richer”, where any story that is liked by many, is further seen by many and then shared by many others giving it a ripple effect. Thus while the traffic from a source like Google sees the dispersion of traffic onto various pages on your site, traffic from Facebook is limited to the only few pages.

A recent study by Chartbeat on more than 50,000 publisher sites quantify this by the help of diversity index (Shannon entropy). A low entropy corresponds to traffic that’s highly concentrated on a few pages, while a high entropy corresponds to traffic that’s more distributed across a larger number of pages. As per the report, “Google traffic tends to have about 3 bits more entropy than Facebook traffic, meaning it’s about 8x more spread out across topics.”

In case of any big event like the Paris attacks of 2015, the content consumption gets limited to very few pages on very few sites, thus moving entropy to near Zero.

Usage of the Content Consumed

If we dig deeper we will find that what writers write & how users consume it vary widely. Let’s analyzed the event of Brexit and the stories written around it, we would find that most of the stories consumed on Facebook have an emotional angle to it, while most of the stories read on Google have an analytical and logical angle to it.

Courtesy; Chartbeat.

How People behave during a Major event?

People do not wait for the new to come to them rather they actively seek them, it is only after the event has subsidized & they are informed they form an opinion & take it to social media to share it with others. Let us circle back to the Paris attacks of 2015 & see how the traffic behaved on two of the mediums.

As you can see Traffic from active sites like Google increase immediately after an event, while it takes some time for the social media traffic to increase & reach its peak. However, in the longer run, the overall volume of social media sites is much larger than that of Google.

Do more Social shares mean more Engagement with Content?

So this is the question every marketers & agency is asking…Do more shares mean more engagement? The answer is not necessarily. High interactions or virality on social media don’t always translate into actual reader engagement with stories.

If virality would have corresponded to the number of shares than we would have got a rather straight line, rather what we see is a scattered data set. This means growth in shares does not necessarily correspond to actual engagement.

So what it means for marketers, where to put money?

In my opinion, if your business is getting affected by a recent event or breaking new (let say Brexit or demonetization, or rate cut by Fed) the first promotion medium should always be "Search". You should always try to get display on all the related sites & go lateral on as many keywords relating to the news as you can. If you are expecting news to take a little longer to gestate (like linking Aadhar with account opening or a new regulation in any specific sector) than social media can go long way. But, do remember higher shares is not always equal is not always equal to higher engagement. Two plus two is not equal to four anymore!!