Between Facebook’s 1.3 billion registered users and Twitter’s over 800 million users, businesses have come to realize that they absolutely must use social media to reach their audience. Indeed, the potential for reaching and interacting with people in this way is exciting for business. However, many businesses simply do not have the resources to use both Facebook and Twitter for marketing and advertising. Which one, then, is best? Let’s take a look at how these two social media giants stack up against each other when it comes to promoting your business.
Advertising
Facebook was first out of the gate with advertising possibilities for businesses. In addition to sidebar ads, which have been around for a few years already, advertisers can also do sponsored posts (including photos), and can encourage interaction and likes with prompts and questions. You can pay per click or pay per views, and you can set your own budget starting at just a dollar a day.
Twitter recently revamped its ad structure, and while it’s a bit more competitive with Facebook now, it focuses more on Twitter’s unique offerings. Namely, businesses can pay to promote tweets, trends (you know, those words next to hashtags), and even whole accounts. Promoting tweets and accounts are relatively affordable, starting at just 50¢ per engagement. Trends, on the other hand, run a lot more: $200,000 per day. Obviously, these are not for the small business budget, but promoted tweets and accounts may very well be. It’s also important to remember that Twitter is all about short conversation (in 140 characters or fewer), so you’re a bit more limited in what you can say.
Post Scheduling
Both Facebook and Twitter allow for post scheduling. This is extremely convenient because you can set up your marketing campaign in advance and have posts or tweets ready to go live exactly when you want them to. The schedulers on both sites are equally easy to use; they work a bit differently, but they’re not complicated, and there are step by step instructions for each. One difference with Facebook is that in addition being able to schedule posts, you can backdate posts. This is a slight advantage, especially if you don’t want your audience to feel bombarded with lots of posts at once.
Post Engagement
This is a fancy term that simply means that a social media user clicked on an ad and followed through on an action. It’s a direct effect of your marketing effect, and it’s an important percentage to measure. However, it’s also an extremely difficult thing to measure. Rates are typically low — 5% is considered good — but it’s so difficult to quantify because you really don’t know the true impact of an ad over time. What if someone sees the ad, doesn’t click on it, but thinks about it for a few days, then takes action maybe a week later? There are other types of engagement, though, such as likes, shares, comments, and retweets. This is why it’s so important to encourage conversation among your audience. It keeps your message current and continually appearing in the feeds of others, and helps you stay in the forefront of your customers’ minds.
Number of Views Per Post
You can know exactly how many people see your post on both Facebook and Twitter. However, it’s important to make the distinction between passive views and active views. In other words, just because someone sees something on social media doesn’t mean that they necessarily think about it. Like post engagement, the number of views per post is difficult to accurately measure because the hard numbers can be misleading.
So what’s the best social media platform for your business? The bottom line is that both Facebook and Twitter offer a lot of positives as well as a few drawbacks. If you have the resources to be active on both, that is probably your best strategy. If you can only use one, you’d be best served to do a careful analysis of which one would be the best social media marketing solution for your business.