Fortune 100 Companies Prefer Twitter Over Facebook

In mid-July I did a series a posts on Facebook or Twitter?. According to yesterday’s eMarketer article: Marketers Embrace Twitter Over Facebook,

“Burson-Marsteller, in a July 2009 study of Fortune 100 companies, found that more companies had a presence on Twitter (54%) than on Facebook (29%). “

Furthermore when resources are limited in terms of time to spend on various social media channels, 21% of Fortune 100 companies use only one channel and 76% of those companies were likely to use Twitter, with only 14% choosing Facebook and 10 choosing blogging.

Why?

1. Twitter means business, where Facebook is entertainment.
2. Twitter is a place to connect around specific topics, where Facebook is a place to connect with friends and family.
3. Twitter is about following people you respect and being followed by people who respect you. Facebook is about having friends, sharing photos, events and having fun.
4. The twitter platform enables sharing of good links more freely and with a bigger reach than Facebook. Repeating on (and retweeting) on Twitter is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged, where repeating on Facebook makes your brand across as annoying.



5. Twitter is faster than blogging
6. Tweets are more easily digestible than blog posts. Think “byte” sized chunks of valuable information.
7. Tweeting a link to a blogpost is the norm
8. Twitter combines the fun of Facebook with the information and knowledge value distributed in blogs.
9. Twitter is more mobile and easier to do quickly than Facebook and blogging.
10. Twitter requires more listening than Facebook and blogging and that means the people that embrace the medium are better conversationalists, because dialog means listening and responding.
11. Twitter is real-time, blogging is as soon as I can get to it and Facebook is whenever.  Time means money and money means business.