Betfair is top performing gambling site on social networks

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Posted 09 August 2012 09:41am by David Moth with 6 comments

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Earlier this week Facebook announced that it was teaming up with UK gambling firm Gamesys to launch new apps that allow users to wager real money.

Due to the tight restrictions on gambling it could be seen as a controversial venture for Facebook, but social media and gambling are already firmly intertwined.

The UK's top gambling sites all have a social media presence, with a benchmark report published by QuBit showing that Betfair has the best 'social score' followed by William Hill.

The report evaluates the UK's top ten betting sites based on monthly page view statistics from Doubleclick Adplanner. These also include 888, Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, Bet365, Skybet, Betfred, Stan James and Coral.

The QuBit social scores are calculated based on each company's reach on social networks, which is then weighted based on the average time spent on the website and revenue driven through each source.

Betfair was the only site to have engaged across all five key social networks, with a notable presence on the rapidly growing site Pinterest, which has been found to proportionally drive far more revenue than Facebook.

However at the moment Betfair's account has just 12 followers, despite creating 10 boards with a total of 129 pins.

So while it should be commended for being an early adopter and experimenting with Pinterest, it's unlikely that the social network's predominantly female user base will be flocking to view the boards in high numbers.

Skybet is the only other brand in the report that has a Pinterest account, but its one board has just four followers.

QuBit's analysis shows that all sites engaged strongly with Facebook and Twitter, with an average of 29,900 likes and 20,800 followers.

The benchmark report also looks at the bookmaker's search performance. This chart shows a breakdown of the number of Google searches in which each site will appear on the first page of results.

The strength of brands within the online gambling industry is highlighted by high level of reach achieved through paid and organic brand searches. 

The brand name Coral clearly has the best brand paid and organic first page reach. 

William Hill and Bet365 achieved the greatest reach through paid and organic high-traffic, which could prove the most lucrative in this market as these customers are less likely to yet have a specific brand loyalty.