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Facebook is a great choice for marketing your business
In the world of social media marketing, Facebook is king. You hear a lot about Twitter, but comparitively speaking, Facebook represents a much larger and more mature platform for marketing your business. Of course, smart companies will utilize any number of social networking sites to promote their products. But, if you are a small or medium sized business and only have resources to focus on one, you should strongly consider Facebook.
Here are five reasons why Facebook is better than Twitter for promoting your business:
Community / Size
As popular as Twitter has become, Facebook has a vastly larger audience. According to Compete.com, Twitter has a monthly visitor total of about 22 million users. Facebook weighs in at about 122 million users. What's more, Twitter users are more likely to sign up once and never login again. A recent Harvard Business Review study finds that 90% of Twitter's messages are sent by 10% of its users.
Facebook doesn't make as much noise in mainstream news, but it has a much larger and active userbase. The average Facebook user has 200 friends (very important when we talk about the viral nature of how your business can be promoted on Facebook) and actively "fans" product pages.
Analytics
If you decide to sink your time and resources into establishing a presence on a social network (either Facebook or Twitter) you are going to want to make sure you're measuring your return on investment.
For that, you will need some kind of analytics. While products like Salesforce.com offer tie-in's to Twitter, the service itself (Twitter) doesn't offer any real analytical data on your followers. Facebook pages come with built in analytics that will let you measure how well your page is doing, whether your "fans" like the links, video or imagery you share, how often they take part in conversations you start, as well as a breakdown of the age, sex and regions they live in. Twitter simply doesn't provide this kind of detail.
Viral Promotion
In a sense, social media marketing is about giving your fans a platform to talk about you in a positive way - something Facebook makes seemless. If a fan of your Facebook business page decides to comment on something you've posted, their friends will see that action in their news feed. If your fans mark a photo as something that they "like" then their friends will see that, likewise, if they sign up to attend an event by sending in their RSVP, it shows up for all of their friends to see. In this way, Facebook can make any content viral.
Advertising Platform
Facebook wins here too. Any business owner can create pay per click advertisements on Facebook to promote their business page or events. All you need is a credit card, and you can spend as much (or little) as you want. Facebook will walk you through the process of creating your ad, and through the use of "social actions" you can make your advertisements even more effective by displaying how many friends the person viewing the ad has acted upon each offer. For example, if I RSVP for an event that is being promoted through an ad, then next time my friends see the ad they will see that one of their friends is attending.
There is also a robust targeting feature that comes with advertising on Facebook. Lets say I just want to show an advertisement to people who are of a certain age, live around a certain city and enjoy very specific activities. Because Facebook targeting can key into a person's profile data, advertising there can be hyper targeted.
Facebook Connect API
Finally, Facebook offers web developers the ability to extend their own web sites into the Facebook platform. This is done through the use of Facebook Connect, a series of programming tools that effectively makes a person's Facebook account a "single sign-on" to your web site. It is a very cool technology that is easy to deploy that some top brands have found clever ways of leveraging.
Again, the most savvy internet marketers will find ways to use a mix of social networking sites to get their message out, but Facebook is by far the most mature and largest social network for marketing and advertising. If you are a business owner you should definitely sign up to Facebook and create your own Facebook business page today.
Comments
I bet everybody twitts but nobody read twitts of anybody, your twitter is full of users that you dont any idea who the hell they are. Twittering is a total wasting of time, however, I do all the time, I dont have any idea why...
I find that few people read twits. Regarding Facebook, it is easier to engage in conversations.
Many thanks for a great article. The comments were also helpful. I'll now go back to see how complete my page is in Facebook. I'll also check out about connecting my website to Facebook to expose my BuyNow buttons. My site is www.c-c-c.ws
In marketing my business and others Twitter has trumped them all. Sure facebook has more eyes but it is a platform that elicits broadcast messages. LinkedIn basically no one really uses. Twitter is more like a virtual networking event. Relationships are formed conversations are encouraged. Sure there are less people there but because of the engagement of the community results happen. And because the twitter community are made up of mostly people who like to talk they tell their non-twitter friends about the tweets. With all that said no intelligent business owner would ever abandon one for another. Remember social media is just a tool, like a telephone, bilboard, commercial nothing more. You need to know how to market to use the tool correctly.
Fred Abaroa aka “CostaVidaFred”
The Marketing Imagineer
Twitter: @CostaVidaFred
Blogs:
www.CostaVidaFred.com
Podcasts:
Word On The Tweet
Making Mountains Out Of Mole Hills
I didn't know that facebook could be better for your business. You bring up an interesting argument. Thanks for the information.
Thank God for Face Book it really have helped me and equally helped others tremendously for them to know more about making a huge income from the internet through www.oganmichael.com/international.htm
Many thanx your article
Smarting read Will with good information for the uninformed...be good to also do a screen scrape with myspace, bebo, and linkedin in compare...
TWIT IS LAME just becuase OPrah says tiwt is the bomb it is LAME & i don't want to know what your doing every second of the day Suprised i don't GIVE a &*^%% sorry!Myspace started it & i'm all for the Orignals!!
TWIT SUCKS
Great post. Very informative. I think twitter offers a lot in the form of social media marketing. With that said, Facebook is much more advanced. To the authors point, it'll take many social sites to make up your online marketing mix.
Best,
Ryan
www.squidoo.com/Catalyst-Marketers
Love, love, love Facebook - have not ventured into the Twitter world, yet and have no plans to go there at this point. Have enough to do here on Facebook and don't want to know that much personal information about others or them to know that much about what I am doing all the time, don't want to live on the computer either - Might be old fashion but I believe, allowing for some mystery makes one more attractive and appealing, in the long run.
Thanks for posting and writing this article very helpful. Power to the Facebook world -
Alright, I give up, where did the Facebook analytics come from? Can't find it anywhere...thanks!
@john You can view the insights (thats what Facebook calls their analytics for pages) by visiting a page your the admin for and then clicking on the "See All" link under Insights.
How can I improve my business with facebook? we are into Animation and Game Design Virtual Information & Communications (VIC)
www.virtualinfocom.com we are an start up company how can we improve the business in Game Development , Comics Design and Animations?
A well written piece William but I spot some flaws.
The biggest is that believing that a larger community necessarily equates to better marketing prospects. Facebook has 200 million members, but most people are there for sharing with friends and family, NOT for suppliers! Little doubt your contacts are on the site, but they may not be willing to engage, making your activities there a waste of time. This is especially likely to be true if you focus on B2B rather than consumers. Think about using a more work-based network that may have fewer profiles, but the members are there to network to benefit business.
I'd say it's also much easier to build up a pretty significant following on Twitter, more so than it is fans on Facebook. There may not be tools on Twitter to be able to retrospectively analyse how much you've engaged your audience but, unlike Facebook, you get to see it real time through the number of mentions, retweets and new followers.
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
Check out Phoenix Green Business Examiner on Twitter at: twitter/alternativenrgy as it has been a big boost to my readership over Facebook which is too unwieldly for my applications.
facebook all the wayy x]
You forget that Twitter allows businesses to eavesdrop on casual conversations 24/7. It's like a free wiretap service. This allows businesses to respond immediately and in real time to leads. Because of this, it is FAR more powerful than Facebook ads, which are just -- well --ads. Ads cost money. Twitter monitoring is free and REALLY targeted, not just generally targeted. It's no contest. Additionally, a FB fan page is just another web page that you have to drive traffic to by ppc or some other means...the promotion of it is no different than any standard web page.
There really is nothing that special about Facebook at all as far as marketing goes. I'm not saying it doesn't help...simply that it is nothing special.
Twitter, on the other hand, is very different.
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