I recently posted a long thought piece entitled “How I Failed” on LinkedIn, and then a few days later, republished it here on my own Radar blog. (I published it on LinkedIn first because I wanted to reach the more business-oriented audience on LinkedIn, and not just the technical audience that we reach here with Radar.)
This morning, I decided to check on the resharing stats that are published at the top of posts on both LinkedIn and here on Radar (a WordPress based blog). I normally look at these stats to see the relative impact of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn on the readership of my posts. But this time, I realized I had another data point available – the differences in the use of these services by my Radar readers and my LinkedIn readers.
When I compared the stats this morning, a couple of things surprised me.
As you can see, there was a lot more Twitter activity resulting from the Radar post than from the LinkedIn post, and as expected, a lot more LinkedIn resharing on LinkedIn itself. That wasn’t surprising (although I suspect the amount of engagement LinkedIn has achieved through its Influencer program is a surprise to many people.)
As is usually the case for my posts, I find that Twitter tops Facebook and Google+ for resharing, and that Google+ is a significant fraction of both Twitter and Facebook – showing far more engagement than many critics allow. That is interesting, but wasn’t surprising either.
But what did surprise me a bit is that the share count is identical for both Google+ and Facebook. They both seem to have detected that the two posts were the same, despite the different URLs. Twitter and LinkedIn did not. I expected that of Google. I didn’t expect it of Facebook.