Choosing one social network over another might seem like a toss-up for small business owners. What does it matter which one you use, as long as your business is online? You’re interacting, you’re building a network, so you’re accomplishing your online marketing goals, right?
Well, maybe. But with a little insight you can not only make better decisions about which social network(s) to put time and effort into, you can also learn how to use them more effectively. That means more results in less time, and that’s a good thing for anyone in the hectic world of running a small business.
What Are Your Goals?
(If you don’t know, check out this recent post on how to set your goals – and follow our series on marketing planning.)
What do you want to accomplish with your social networking? If your first answer is “to create an online presence,” well, that’s a good starting point. But what do you want to do with that online presence? Do you want to connect with customers? Get feedback? Build a mailing list? Generate leads? Sell your products and services online? Get people to your blog or website? Collect customer information? Interact with your most loyal customers? Get word-of-mouth spreading via the online networks?
Certainly it would be nice to accomplish all of those things with social networking, and over time you can get close to achieving all. In fact, most of those goals are spin-offs; achieve one, such as spreading word-of-mouth, and you’re automatically achieving another, such as generating sales leads.
But goal achieving isn’t automatic. While any online presence is better than none, a smart small business will make savvy use of the Internet and those vast resources.
Facebook vs. Twitter: A Few Surprises
Facebook is the online giant, bigger than Google now, with 78% of all social networking traffic belonging to Facebook, That’s great news for you, when you set up your Facebook Business Page. And Twitter, with only 5% of the social networking traffic, is a much, much smaller piece of the pie. But traffic isn’t the only thing that matters; you not only need people to visit you (on Facebook or Twitter) you also need them to respond, to interact, to follow through, to take you up on those great offers. And while Facebook, the social giant, gets an average of 3 clicks per link posted, Twitter users get a much higher response: an average of 19 clickthroughs for each embedded link. That’s a huge difference!
How to Be Savvy
Now before you go delete your Facebook page and focus all your time and attention on Twitter, take a moment. Facebook and Twitter are vastly different social networks, and if you’re smart, you’ll use both – in a partnership – and reap the benefits of both. Here are a few key differences:
Facebook reaches a bigger audience, but Twitter reaches a more targeted audience. So it’s going to take longer to get noticed on Facebook, but there’s huge potential once that happens. Once you do cross an attention threshold with Facebook, your audience is almost unlimited. So realize that you’ll have to invest more time into building up your Facebook page, but that the investment can pay off in big numbers.
Twitter is very of-the-moment, but Facebook makes browsing easier. Although the new Twitter interface makes it easier to look back at the history of a particular user, it’s a different atmosphere. Twitter users want to be in the moment, so if they miss your first link or mention, they might not go back and find it. With Facebook, however, when a user visits your page they get all your latest information right there in one spot, and responding to older posts or information is easier and more common. Use Twitter to tweet and retweet relevant news, information, links, updates, deals, and ongoing items of interest, and use Facebook to interact on a deeper level with your customers and fans.
Image by 10ch.
Sources:
Entrepreneur Magazine
SocialTwist Sharing Trends Report
Great post. I would agree with most of what you had to say. Both sites serve different purposes. Twitter tends to be about getting attention, whereas facebook is more about engagement and building trust. Both sites can be used to help with driving attention to your brand. But if you are looking to really connect and convert customers into loyal fans, facebook is clearly the better choice.
Thanks for the great article,
@jwsokol
Thanks for the interesting stats–had no idea the click-through rates for Twitter were so much higher.
I’m like the high school girl who breaks up with her boyfriend every other week–I alternate between ‘loving’ FB and Twitter, sometimes due to whimsical reasoning…
I think Twitter has more bang for your biz buck, tho. It’s much easier to build relationships and focus on listening.
Thanks for the good info,
@talktherapybiz