Facebook or Twitter? Marketing Showdown

Have you ever wondered who would win in a fight, Facebook or Twitter? It’s a very common question – which is better, Facebook or Twitter, and at the risk of disappointing, let me give you this quick answer, “neither and both.” Here are three reasons why it’s not going to benefit our marketing to try and match Twitter and Facebook against each other.

1. Twitter and Facebook are not Social Media Marketing.
We need to stop thinking of all social media channels as “social media marketing.” “We need to be on Facebook” is not a marketing goal. Twitter and Facebook are tools you can use to promote your brand, business or organization. But in themselves they are just channels or tactics. They’re like fishing rods. They don’t catch fish by themselves. But when used well and with some experience they can make one into a fisherman.

2. Facebook is based on entities, Twitter is based on conversation.
This is seen in two significant ways:

a. The people and content search functions are vastly different:

Effective social media marketing is heavily dependent on finding and interacting with people. But since the networks have such different search functions, finding people is a different matter for each.Facebook is about entities such as pages, groups, and people. Twitter is about people and the “words” they share. When we search on Twitter we see what people are talking about. When we search on Facebook we get pages and groups and people first, not conversations. And we can’t join in the conversation because on Facebook they happen in closed networks. Even responses to posts on business pages are not really conversations, they are just streams of comments.

What this means is that we need different approaches for the two channels. We’ll talk more about this in the next section.

b. Facebook is visual, Twitter is linguistic:
On Facebook we should use powerful, funny, appealing visuals on Twitter we should use carefully crafted, catchy, headline-style posts.

3. What works on Facebook doesn’t work on Twitter and vice versa

Since Facebook is about pictures and entities and Twitter is about words, we clearly need separate strategies for each channel. And just to clarify, when we talk about Facebook, we mean Pages, not personal accounts. In general when we talk about Twitter and Facebook marketing we talk about business purposes, not personal reasons.

We analyzed 4 months of social media campaigns and were able to confirm what works best for each channel.

The most effective ways to drive new Facebook followers/fans:

1. Twitter (sorry we just can’t do away with Twitter). Invite your Twitter followers to friend your page on Facebook.
2. User-generated content (some refer to it as UGC) – we’ve been applying grass-roots marketing in the form of social media ambassador programs and the content the ambassadors produced drew in good numbers of new fans.
3. User-generated content contests. This method is by far the most successful form of Facebook marketing (the graph below only shows the kick off dates for the campaign. A few weeks later we had doubled the number of new fans).

The most effective ways to generate page interactions:

1. There is an association between the volume of posts we published and interactions. The more we posted the more interactions we got.
2. User-generated content, as expected, generates interactions.

WHAT WORKS ON TWITTER:

Twitter doesn’t just look like the simpler version of Facebook. It is simpler.

Conversation reigns supreme on Twitter. By conversation we don’t mean broadcasting news and self-promotional posts. By conversation we mean actually chatting with people on Twitter, Tweeting @ people.

You can see in the graph below that there is a direct association between a consistently high volume of conversation and spikes in the number of followers. Similarly, during the periods when conversation slowed down, we lost followers.

Where the spikes in conversation were temporary no changes are noticeable. So don’t sweat it if you miss a day of tweeting. Similarly, just one day of extensive conversation doesn’t seem to have an impact. When the volume of conversation was consistently high over longer periods of time we saw an increase in the number of followers. We are confident that this effect applies mostly when we tweet with existing and new followers, not just existing followers.

CONCLUSION:

Good strategies, plans and solid execution using these tactical channels will drive results, not the channels in themselves. So when we talk about which one is most effective, the results depend less on the channels themselves than in how we put them to good use.

When in doubt, test and learn, is our mantra. Or give us a call, we’ll help you out.

Have you seen results like these? Leave us a comment. We’d love to learn about additional things that may or may not work.