Twitter vs Facebook – the final reckoning

Ok, that’s something of an overly dramatic headline. But hey, it’s Monday. Work with me.

Anyway, I was talking to a client the other day about the basic differences between Twitter and Facebook; this is a conversation that happens fairly frequently and so in the spirit of the blog I wrote the other day about writing about what your customers ask you, I figured I’d share my spin on this.

If you do a search in Google for Twitter vs Facebook, then you get offered a choice of around 350 million pages addressing this issue. Opinions about this subject are like wisdom teeth – everyone has them, but most people should have them removed. For me, rather asking a social media maven, the starting point on Twitter and Facebook is to go to the source; the sites themselves.

Helpfully, both Twitter and Facebook have tag lines in their calls to action – their status update boxes. Let’s have a look at what they say:

Twitter: What’s Happening?

Facebook: What’s on your mind?

And that, essentially, is the bottom line. All of their functionality is extrapolated from this, and in turn, our use should be too.

Simply put, Twitter is best seen as a tool for the instant dissemination of information – literally, what is happening at that time. I wrote a blog. My train is late. I just read this article. Anyone know how late the tube runs?

When I first came across Twitter in 2007, it was when I was at the music industry back slapathon South by South West, in Austin, Texas. If you can remember those dark ages, we didn’t have smart phones and push notifications. What we did have there, though, was a lot of different shows in a lot of different venues, and the need to meet and network  (‘network’ is music biz-ese for ‘buy drinks for someone and tell them how totally awesome they are in order to lead to a swapping of business cards’) a whole bunch of people. And that’s where this ‘Twitter’ site came in – you could text your update, ‘In La Zona Rosa, who’s loving the Detroit Cobras?’ and your network of followers would all get an automatic text notification of this and come looking for free drinks. Essentially, then, it’s not changed – instant communication of events across an extended network.

Facebook, then, is somewhat different. Its focus is vaguer – by asking what people are thinking, or feeling, they’re trying to focus not just on an event, but on people’s feeling about it. This translates into the way we use it, too – personal reactions to music, TV and most relevantly to us, brands. Brands and websites are able to use Facebook to influence the way that their customers and users feel about them; it’s very much a soft marketing approach, but to be more aggressive risks alienating followers.

So, what’s our conclusion? I’m not going to tell you how to manage your campaign down to the fine details, but I think it’s worth asking yourself, whenever you’re going to post something, does it fit in with what the site is asking you, and are you posting the right thing in the right stream?