Google vs Facebook, what’s the most effective to gain traffic?

…and the winner is… Facebook. That’s the answer looking at data from Experian Hitwise.

From Business Insider: “On November 16, Apple’s iTunes store started offering Beatles songs for sale. A week later, more than 2 million Beatles tracks had been downloaded. How did these buyers arrive at iTunes?According to Experian Hitwise, UK search queries related to The Beatles increased 30-fold during the week they went on sale on iTunes. But those queries didn’t necessarily guide users to iTunes. Although Apple paid for 67% of the traffic from the keywords “The Beatles,” it was only the ninth-biggest destination for UK surfers who searched that term, behind Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook, which didn’t pay for any Beatles-related queries.This doesn’t mean that Facebook drove a larger absolute number of viewers to Apple than Google did. But Facebook did a more effective job than Google of reflecting new information–“Beatles songs are now on sale at iTunes”–and showing users where to buy them. Don’t worry Big G, clients are still buying keywords, but also begging their happy customers to post on Facebook and user-rating sites like Yelp“.

…as you know there’s a lot of rumors about a new social network that is supposed to be launched by Google  before spring…and now we have a reason more to think that this is the right way to compete on the new scenario that social media are drawing on the web. (Consider also rumors about Twitter acquisition and Groupon). Will Google succeed where they failed till now?