• July 15, 2009

Twitter may not be about to supplant YouTube, but it does keep people watching videos longer than some social networking rivals. A new study by TubeMogul found, on average, that audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watched a video 37% longer than viewers referred from Facebook, and 50% longer than those sent from Digg.

Twitter-referred viewers watched on average for one minute, 58 seconds, compared to 1:14 for Facebook, and :58 for Digg. People clicking video links from MySpace clocked in at 1:42. How does the service synonymous with a short attention span keep video watchers sticking around?

TubeMogul Marketing Director David Burch isn't sure but surmises it has something to do with Twitter's one-way following. "Digg and Facebook have a lot of noise and a lot of people that are fake friends," he said. "But your Twitter feed can be customized to exactly what you want." That, in turn, means people may watch videos linked from Twitter longer because they tend to be more relevant. Or so the theory goes.

To come up with its findings, TubeMogul recorded a sample of 6.8 million video streams referred by links from Digg, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter over three months. So if someone sent a Tweet saying "check out this video" and provided a link, the video measurement firm tracked any viewers that clicked the link. --Mark Walsh