UK Study: Top Twitter stories shared '350 times more' on Facebook than Google+

A study of the 100 most tweeted news stories form 10 UK outlets has found news is "350 times more likely to be shared on Facebook than on Google+".

Journalism.co.uk asked Rippla, which launched in November and measures "how well news organisations are doing on social media", to look at statistics for Google+, which is one-year-old today.

Sunny Hundal, who created Rippla (and is also editor of the Liberal Conspiracy blog), analysed the most popular UK news stories from the 10 outlets from 1 to 26 June.

The popularity of the story was measured by how many times it was tweeted so as not to rely on stories by how popular they were on Facebook or Google+. Hundal took the top 100 stories on Twitter and then assessed how many shares that story got on Facebook compared to Google+.

"There was a massive disparity. On average a person is 350 times more likely to share a story on Facebook than they are on Google+."

The table of the results is at this link and show the most shared story on Google+ out of the 100 analysed was the BBC story "Alan Turing: Inquest's suicide verdict 'not supportable'".

Asked about the types of stories people are sharing on Google+, Hundal said many were technology stories, adding that the Daily Mail has also found popularity on the platform. There is a "Daily Mail" page with 81,000 followers and "Daily Mail showbiz", which has 300 followers.

"The Daily Mail is the most popular site for sharing on Facebook, followed by the BBC and then the Guardian and the same is true on Google+.

"It seems to me that the same kind of stories, like human interest stories with big pictures and grabby headlines, are the ones that do best on Google+ as is the case with Facebook. Twitter however sees more newsy stories being popular."

Google+ has meanwhile launched two new features to celebrate it's first birthday: an Android tablet app (an iPad app is "coming soon") and "events".

"Events" work by a Google+ user inviting others before the occasion takes place. Then when the event takes place it moves to "party mode" with photos being added in real-time, and after the event the pictures are all storied in one place.

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