In researching our recent report on Google Plus, I asked social listening and intelligence provider Converseon for some help. They agreed to review more than 2,500 direct user interactions with 20 leading brands on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. (They tracked only direct user interactions, meaning posts directly onto brands' Facebook or Google Plus pages, comments on brands' Facebook or Google Plus posts, and @mentions of brands on Twitter. The brands were selected from among Interbrand's list of top global brands.) The goal? To determine whether those user interactions were mostly positive or mostly negative and to see whether the sentiment of user interactions varied by site.

In the end, that research didn't make it into the final report — but I thought you might like to see the data anyway, and the folks at Converseon agreed to let me share the results.

We expected there might be big differences in the tone of users' interactions with brands on each site. But it turns out about one-half of user interaction on each site was positive. And as for the question in the title of this blog post ("Do people complain more on Twitter or on Facebook?") — exactly one-fifth of user interaction on both Facebook and Twitter was negative.

Sentiment of user interactions with brands on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter

Thanks again to Converseon for pulling this data and allowing us to share it here.