Businesses alike can agree that social media marketing can have a positive effect on a business' success. Whether your business' goal is to increase sales or better connect to customers, promoting your business through the social media spaces will help you achieve it. The popular platforms of choice for small business marketing tend to be Facebook and Twitter. Many success stories have come from these heavyweight social networking sites, so it's worth examining which platform has more marketing power for your business. To do so, it is important to understand some background information about Facebook and Twitter.
What is Facebook?
In case you haven't heard, there is a very popular social networking site called Facebook. Facebook was created in 2004 to allow college students to network with each other. Since then, it has grown to allow anyone to sign-up (at least 13 years old) and has transformed into the largest social networking site in the World. With over 800 million active users, Facebook is aimed at bringing friends, family, associates, and businesses together on its platform.
What is Twitter?
In the other corner, you have Twitter. Twitter is a free micro-blogging social networking site that allows celebrities, businesses and even average people like us to sign-up and keep the 'Twittersphere' updated on what's going on. The aim of Twitter is to answer the question "what are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. Twitter boasts over 100 million active users with those active users contributing to the 250 million daily 'tweets' that the service receives.
Which one is better for marketing?
There have been tons of debates and studies suggesting why Facebook is better than Twitter for marketing and vice versa, but to answer the question, Facebook is better for marketing your small business. Here's why:
· Facebook is larger and has a more active fan base: This is an obvious one. As stated in the background information above, Facebook has a larger number of users than Twitter. But having more users than Twitter means absolutely nothing if those users aren't active, right? Facebook's 800 million+ active users to Twitter's 100 million+ active users is a great reason why your business has more to gain from being on Facebook than Twitter.
· Facebook for Business: Arguably a top reason why Facebook is better for your small business than Twitter. Facebook for Business is a platform that literally walks you through the stages of putting your business on Facebook. Twitter simply doesn't have a clear platform like Facebook does for businesses to get started. With Facebook for Business, you don't even need to know how to use Facebook. Create a fan page, create a targeted ad, and begin promoting your business through its platform. It has never been easier.
· Integrated applications and custom tabs: Another great thing about Facebook is how easy it is to integrate apps such as maps, YouTube videos, games, contests, deals and promotions. There seems to be a free app for everything you want to add to your fan page. Facebook also allows you to create custom tabs and landing pages. Are you a restaurant? Create a tab for your menu so users can easily navigate to it. Running a special promotion? Make it a landing image so that when potential customers come to your page, your special offer will be the first thing they see. Twitter just doesn't have the ability to do this.
· Facebook Insights: Facebook insights is an analytics-based engine that tracks everything from clicks, impressions, fan growth, user engagement and demographics. As a business owner, you should want to know what's working for your business and what's not. Use Facebook Insights to learn more about your fans and do everything you can to optimize. Twitter doesn't let you track such statistics as easy it should, without using a third-party app like HootSuite, which can be very complicated for small business owners.
· Visual appeal: Yet another great advantage to Facebook marketing is the visual appeal. On Twitter, everything is text-based. When you upload a picture or video, it shows as a link that users must click on to see the image. Facebook allows businesses to attach pictures or videos to posts that show up right in their fans' newsfeeds - eliminating the need for another step for the user (clicking on a link). Not being able to see pictures and videos without clicking on a link is a huge disadvantage that Twitter has yet to confront.
These benefits surely support the statement that Facebook has much more marketing power than Twitter, but Twitter still has its advantages. It is still very important to research and make an educated decision on which platform would benefit your business the most.
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