Facebook or Twitter: which one is better for your business?

In a quandary as to which social media platform is best for your business? Perhaps these tips will help you decide. Below is a list of the differences, advantages and disadvantages to your business when using each one. Careful scrutiny will help you decide if you are making the best use of your time and effort.

 Main advantages and disadvantages of each one – and how to work around the bad

 Facebook: You can add “updates” which show up in a stream on your Facebook profile, kind of like a blog. These can be simple text comments, or you can share links, videos, and pictures. You can decide if you want each update you make to be visible to everyone, just your friends, or just certain groups of friends. Others can “like” updates to show their approval or they can comment on the update with their thoughts.

You won’t see every update. Facebook uses an algorithm that many people dislike, which shows you updates from friends and pages that it things you will like best, based on your past activity.

 Twitter: You only have two privacy options for your updates on Twitter. First, you can set to private, which means that you have to approve someone before they can read your updates. Most people, however, have their profiles open, which mean everything you say is public to the whole world.

On Twitter, you will see the entire stream of anyone you’ve followed, in real time as they are tweeting. Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t use an algorithm to determine what it thinks you want to see. However, this means that for many people, the stream moves REALLY quickly, especially because you can follow thousands of people.

 Solution: One way to solve this problem – to ensure that you’re not missing the updates from the people who really matter to you, is to create lists. Lists can be public or private. You might, for example, create a private list of “top customers” for your business, to make sure you always see and reply to their tweets.

 Which has the higher likelihood of being seen, heard and read?

Facebook has more than double the active users of Twitter, but their algorithm determines which content you see in your news feed, and how often in a given period of time. This can make it more challenging for your audience to see your content, especially with the algorithm changes they’ve been making recently, which impacts business content even more, unless you pay to promote your posts.

 Twitter, however, is composed of one consistently streaming news feed of content/tweets, no restrictions applied. As people who follow your business Twitter account follow more people and businesses, their stream also becomes noisier. It can be easy for your content to get lost in the mix.

On the upside, the search function within Twitter is more robust and is utilized more often than Facebook. If you’re tweeting information people care about, the likelihood that it will be found is much greater via Twitter.

Hashtags – how do they help your business?

Hashtags originated on Twitter, but are now used on Facebook as well. In both cases, they can be awesome to use for your business, but they’re used differently on these two platforms. Hashtags are the pound symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase.

On Twitter, hashtags can be used to search for people talking about a specific topic. Using a hashtag in your tweet makes the work clickable, so you can see the entire stream of people tweeting, even people you aren’t following. This mean that if someone hashtags your product, service or business name, they can be redirected towards them with every click.

Facebook uses hashtags too, but the use on this platform the culture is completely different. Facebook hashtags are still a relatively new addition, and while you will see people using them in the funny way listed above, people rarely click on hashtags to search for other speaking about the same topic. On Twitter, it’s all about finding new, interesting people and companies, but Facebook is a more intimate setting, so people aren’t typically seeking out strangers to have conversations with. Typically, it does more harm than good for you to use hashtags on Facebook, since it takes away from links that you actually do want people to click.

How do hashtags help your business? On Twitter, it allows one to find other people talking about the same topic, and second, to participate in Twitter chats/parties by using a hashtag and connecting with people who are interested in your industry so you find new people to follow who are possibly interested in following you too.

On Facebook, hashtags hold no real bearing except maybe for humorous purposes.

Being able to separate business from personal – good or bad?

Another key difference between the two is that Facebook is able to separate business and personal accounts. Unlike Twitter that lets all the accounts engage with each other, Facebook makes a definite distinction between business and personal.

This is a disadvantage on Facebook, because your business page cannot proactively connect with individuals with personal profiles. Individuals have to first like your page and you still can’t reach out to them directly unless they message you first. This is not the case with Twitter, as you can follow pretty much anyone as long as they haven’t blocked you or have a protected account.

Which will be read by more people?

One of the key disadvantages of Twitter is the speed – information flows and fades too fast for it to be memorable. Depending on how many people you follow, a tweet can literally stay in your feed for mere seconds. And there isn’t any way for the ‘good’ tweets to rise to the top, unless you pay to promote a tweet.

With Facebook, if your content is really good and a lot of people interact with it via likes, comments and shares, it’s possible for your post to have a longer news feed shelf life. And if your community shares it, there’s a higher probability that it’ll be seen by people you aren’t connected with. This is true, however, with retweets on Twitter.

To summarise, each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages. Just analyse and think which one will work to your benefit the best – and which one fits your need.

Tips:

Choose Facebook if:

• You have a large follower base on your personal profile that you can leverage for your business page.
• You have a little budget that can be put towards promoting your posts.

Choose Twitter if:

• You have a niche product or service that people might be using Twitter search to investigate
• You have a lot of content to share and plan to be proactive in your interaction with other accounts.
• You want to share great information that’s not directly tied to your company. Answering questions, retweeting, sparking up conversation, and being helpful on Twitter can lead to people investigating you more and following your account.