More Facebook users subscribe to email newsletters, but Twitter users engage more

Facebook is a more effective channel for growing subscribers for an email mailing list than Twitter, but Twitter users are more likely to engage, according to figures published by a US email marketing firm.

The figures, published by email newsletter marketing firm Privy.com, show the channels its customers received their 250,000 most recent email newsletter signups through.

By far the most successful channel for generating new email subscribers was businesses’ own websites, accounting for 55.27% of all new sign-ups, with most other subscribers coming through paid (32.6%) or organic links (10.6%) on Facebook. By contrast, just 1.6% of signups originated from Twitter.

However, subscribers obtained through Twitter had a significantly higher conversion rate than subscribers gained through paid Facebook links, by a margin of 25.61% to 17.41%. However, the most successful channels in terms of engagement were subscribers from business websites (35.31%) or organic Facebook links (27.8%).

Ironically, despite the effectiveness of organic Facebook links, users are seeing far fewer of them, following a decision by Facebook last year to reduce the number of organic links its users see from companies.

Facebook claimed its research showed users would prefer to see fewer organic links from businesses in their News Feeds, preferring paid links from the social network instead.