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.

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?