Facebook or Twitter?
A Conclusion

In the last five days I posted responses to an article titled 5 Reasons why Facebook is better than Twitter for your Business. Here’s the conclusion to those posts:

While both services off ways to expand your network and become more visible in the social sphere online, I don’t believe it is wise to focus on just one over the other.

I use Facebook mostly for personal connections with friends and family, for sharing photos and for having fun. The entertainment value on Facebook is big, but for me, it’s not really a place to be thinking about business. That’s not to say businesses shouldn’t be there, but if you are, you need to engage your fans and group members to keep them interested in what you are doing.

Is having a Facebook page a way to keep in touch with your customers and reach out to potential customers? YES, but only if you actively monitor it and keep adding interest to it.

Does Facebook have something to offer advertisers? YES, especially if your customers are active on Facebook.

Can Twitter help you understand your customers and build your brand? YES, but you also need to listen to what people are saying on Twitter and engage in conversation with them around your brand and related industry topics.

Does Twitter itself offer value for advertisers? No, but third-party sites can help you reach out to Twitter users who may be interested in publishing your ads.

Finally, I don’t believe it is an either/or question. Participating in any marketing medium means you have to do the research to understand what the medium has to offer and whether it is the right medium for you. For some businesses a presence on Facebook will perform better than a Twitter presence, and for other businesses vice versa. Comparing Facebook to Twitter is like comparing apples to oranges. Yes they are both fruits, but they have different textures and flavors and require different preparation and treatment for consumption.

It’s interesting that Facebook is ranked number 4 and Twitter is ranked number 25 on Quantcast and also that both sites skew more towards women than men.

Also according to Quantcast, Facebook “attracts a more affluent, teen and young adult, very slightly female biased following.The typical visitor reads USA Today and subscribes to People,” and Twitter “attracts a slightly more female than male group.The typical visitor reads Perez Hilton, subscribes to Entertainment Weekly, and visits tennayalayouts.com.”

What does that say about Facebook and Twitter? Could it mean that Facebook is old and Twitter is new?

The conclusion: It all depends on who you are talking with.

Facebook or Twitter?

Yesterday I posted about my thoughts on the community and size of Facebook versus Twitter based in response to a recent blogpost touting Facebook being better for business than Twitter.  That was reason number one.  Here is reason number two:

2.  Analytics
Yes, it is important to track your ROI (return on investment and now also known as return on influence).  Yes, Facebook provides interesting analytical data for business owners inside of the Facebook site and there isn’t anything coming directly from Twitter to show statistics yet.  However, just because Twitter doesn’t include an analytics package service on the site, doesn’t mean there is no way to see data about your twitter profile and how many people are following you.

Just as there are numerous developers creating applications for use on Facebook, there are also numbers developers building tools that work off the Twiiter API.

For example, you can track how many people followed any link you posted on Twitter through services like http://tr.im and http://bit.ly.  There are ways to see where your followers are tweeting from, tools to track demographics, how quickly people grew their followers and thousands more.  Granted, it takes a twitter-nut to find all of the relevant tracking tools, but saying there aren’t any is incorrect. Sysomos, for example offers a wide range of analytics on social media. It’s not free, but there are plenty of others if you have the time to try them out.

Twitter Users By Age Group

Do Teens Really Not Use Twitter?

As Chris Brogan says, the first one there wins the game, but what if the game isn’t whether to use Facebook or Twitter?  What if you really need to participate on both?

Facebook or Twitter?

A recent post called 5 Reasons why Facebook is better than Twitter for your business, William Smith of the Internet Marketing Examiner describes why he believes Facebook is better for small to medium sized businesses.  In the next five posts I will provide my thoughts on this.

1.  Community/Size
Smith argues that Facebook’s community (122 million) is much larger than Twitter’s (22 million), implying therefore that as a business owner you have a bigger reach on Facebook.  Yes, most Facebook user’s have about 200 friends, but what are they talking about and what are they interested in?  IMHO most of the activity on Facebook is social.  People are there to relax and have fun.  It’s like a birthday party where you know all the people you invited and you feel comfortable talking about random thing with them.  They are not there to do business or be thinking about their favorite brand.  They are there, yes, but if they are not talking with your company or on your company’s fan page, are they really beneficial to your business.

If you are advertising, then you can certainly target Facebook users well, but FB’ers are still resistant to ads and click through rates are low.  Social media is about being social, not about messaging and targeting.

On Twitter on the other hand, it is easy to find the people who are talking about your brand and start conversations with them.  Conversations start relationships and on Twitter it’s not just conversations between friends (as it is on Facebook), it’s conversations that are happening in public about your brand.  It is easy to listen to the conversation and start participating by just following any mentions of your brand.  Just enter your company name or any brand or topic into Twitter’s Search Tool and you’ll see what people are saying about it on Twitter.  It’s like Google, but for a view at what the twitterverse is saying about your brand.

Going back to the party analogy, Twitter is more like a business cocktail party than a birthday party, because you are there to meet people, share a little information and chat with people who seem interesting to you.  It’s about networking for business, not just reconnecting as friends.

Yes Compete shows more unique visitors to Facebook than Twitter, but look at the Compete Ranking growth of Twitter.  Because it is a little more technical, a little more intelligent, a little less fun maybe, and more business oriented, it is slower to take off, but growing rapidly and the uses for business are inherent instead of add-ons as they are on Facebook.

As for Facebook not making mainstream news as much as Twitter, the reason is because Facebook is a closed network and twitter is a public timeline.  How many times recently have you heard about breaking news that was first reported on Twitter?  Why?  What do you have with you at all times?  That’s right, your cell phone, and posting a quick news update to your favorite mobile twitter service is quick, easy and has the potential to reach a lot more people more quickly than on Facebook, because people build followings of not just friends who may be interested in a number of different things, but followers who are in the same niche market as the tweeter.

Twitter is still an infant and Facebook is a teenager.  I think we’ll see steady growth in the number of Twitter users and Facebook is already starting to plateau.

Tomorrow we’ll look at Analytics on Facebook versus Twitter.

A Beneficial Merger

Client site A was competing with site B for traffic about a similar topic. The two sites were competing for search results and traffic to promote a similar physical location. Site B was a bit out of date, but had been on the Internet a lot longer than site A. The information on site B complements the information on site A. Client A had a good relationship with the owner of site B, so we decided to pursue merging the two sites into one. The final merged site is still in development, but the immediate result after setting up a redirect from site B’s domain to site A’s domain is a good increase in traffic to site A. Client A is happy, which means we are happy and more importantly people looking for information on this topic will only need to go to one site instead of two.

Additional traffic in 2009 compared to 2008 as a result of redirect
Traffic in 2009 compared to 2008

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Daily visits doubled and tripled after redirect
Daily visits doubled and tripled after June 19th

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Monitor your analytics and statistics log files to see the impact of any significant changes you make to your site, marketing plans and overall online presence. Sometimes you may be surprised by the result. (Hint: Results are not always good, but mistakes will help you learn.)

Social Media Spending Predicted to Grow by 34% In 5 Years

From today’s PR 2.0 post by Brian Solis today, The Decline of Traditional Advertising and the Rise of Social Media, we see that Forrester Research is predicting strong growth in Social Media and Mobile advertising spending over the next five years.

Social Media spending is predicted to grow by 34% from $716 million in 2009 to a forcast $3,113 million in 2014. Advertising on mobile devices is expected to grow by 27% from $391 million in 2009 to $1,274 in 2014.

Why is this no surprise?

  1. Social media is more easily accessibly on mobile devices
  2. Mobile devices are more accessible (read cheaper) to own than laptops and desktop computers, so more people have them.
  3. What do you carry with you all the time? Your keys, your wallet and…. that’s right, your cell phone.
  4. People are much more accustomed to getting information anywhere anytime, than having to wait to look it up at a specific location, like a library, newspaper stand or even their own desktop computer.
  5. People are much more mobile, traveling more frequently, because being away from the office doesn’t mean being disconnected from work.
  6. Your mobile device is personal and social media keeps you connected with all your friends, colleagues and the relationships that make your world go round.
  7. Mobile application development is rampant.
  8. Smaller is better (i.e. carrying a phone instead of a laptop) and your phone is not just a phone – it’s also your email, your SMS, your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, web browser, your music and almost anything else you want to use it for.
  9. Attention spans are getting shorter and quick messaging is en vogue
  10. Your mobile device is the only thing an advertiser can be pretty sure paying attention to when you’re available to receive information
  11. Because everything is digital it’s much easier to track usage, trends and customer behavior online than it was with traditional media and this leads to innovative ways to personalize information so that it is valuable to each consumer.

If you’re not participating in social media yet, jump right in. As Brian says “Participation is Marketing” and you have to participate first as a person (not a marketer) in order to understand the medium and how to work within it.

Putting the Public Back into PR

I highly recommend Putting the Public Back in to PR by Brian Solis and Deidre Breckenridge. The marketing field is evolving and you need to know how to keep pace with it.

Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Tactics

1. The Title Tag Is Your Friend
Make sure your keywords appear in the title tag and try to keep your title to seven words or less. Think billboard with keywords and make sure the keywords are relevant to the content you are displaying on the page.

2. Think Niche
The more focused each page of your site is around ONE not five, not three, not even two, but just ONE keyword term, the easier it will be to achieve a good ranking for that keyword term. Make sure the content on that page is relevant to the term and include content that is not only good for keyword-loading, but more importantly useful to your HUMAN visitor. Search engines want to offer value to the person doing the search. Remember that there is a person on the other end of the search box and your page should offer value to that person.

3. Link Love
What’s more important than a bunch of friends on Facebook? A bunch of websites linking to your site. You see, search engines look at the number of links coming to a site as a measure of popularity. Think about it. If you have more votes, you get to be president (well most of the time anyway. You get the idea.) And how do you get links? See item number 4

4. Provide Value
The sites that perform best are the ones that have the best content and that’s really what the engines are trying to their searchers. Content has always been and continues to be king, so just quit messing around with Flash, bells and whistles and gratuitous use of technology because it looks sexy. Think about what your customer is looking for and provide them with the content and value they are looking for.

5. Monitor Measure Learn and Adjust

  • Make sure you are monitoring your site’s analytics
  • Set goals that you can measure changes against,
  • Learn what worked and what didn’t and
  • Adjust your content, keywords and design if necessary to improve your results.
  • Oh, and after all of that, rinse and repeat.

Finally if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to see how well your site is optimized, head on over to the Website Grader and get a free report.

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