Tubemogul just released an interesting case study comparing engagement across top social sites (or more exactly referred by top social sites) on video views.
Viewers referred by Twitter tend to watch a video the longest (one minute, 58 seconds), compared to Facebook (one minute, 14 seconds) and Digg (58 seconds).
Tubemogul’s Marketing Manager David Burch words the hypothesis that since Twitter is an asymetric networking system, followers are more engaged with their tweets, it’s the content they chose to track: “There is already a built-in selection bias“. I would formulate a different hypothesis: Twitter has what the two other social networks don’t: A killing search engine. The search experience is particularly engaging because it mixes live reactions and live trends. Only Twitter provides trends as they happen, which means Twitter is THE place to find the hot stuff on the spot.
Compared to Twitter’s global traffic, the search engine doesn’t seem to popular after all:
But if you watch the growth curve of the search engine alone, it shows an obvious infatuation in traffic:
The activity of the Twitter search engine is so shattered across hundreds of apps that only Twitter’s internal intelligence can count all accumulated search queries, and differentiate a click from a follower and a click from a search query.