Adapt Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for Facebook and Twitter

by aschmidt

Facebook vs Twitter Marketing Strategy

If you’re relatively new to social media marketing, then it’s possible that you’re treating your strategies for Facebook and Twitter in the same way. While there are definitely similarities between the two, it’s all too easy to create a “one size fits all” approach to your social media marketing strategy and unwittingly undermine the unique strengths of each platform in the process. The primary objective of most marketers, regardless of platform, is to build brand awareness and increase customer engagement, so it’s important to understand how each platform works so you can tailor your strategy for both its strengths and its constraints. Let’s break it down.

Facebook and Twitter: Some Similarities

Facebook and Twitter have several obvious similarities, including the ability to log in, upload avatars, create profile pages and post status updates (albeit with Twitter there is a 140-character limit per post). In addition, both platforms offer businesses an excellent means to market themselves to users in a manner that is far more personalized than traditional advertising channels. Many businesses have discovered that their Facebook and Twitter pages are excellent sounding boards for customer feedback as well. Savvy companies have taken things a step further by adding social media specialists to their staff whose sole responsibility is to field questions and concerns from customers that originate via their Facebook and Twitter pages.

Facebook’s Size Advantage

Even with all of these similarities between the two sites, businesses must also recognize the essential differences that exist between Facebook and Twitter. It’s estimated that the user base of Facebook is roughly three times that of Twitter (900 million versus 300 million respectively). This means that the potential reach of Facebook as a marketing platform is inherently larger than that of Twitter. Given this information, you might assume that the next step would be to begin an aggressive Facebook marketing campaign by unleashing a barrage of brand-specific status updates. Unfortunately, this practice can actually prove to be counterproductive.

Facebook Marketing: Quality Over Quantity

Facebook’s engineers now claim that there are more than 100,000 different factors that govern the algorithm that determines where and how a post will appear in an individual’s news feed. If businesses aren’t taking the time to create quality posts that will foster genuine engagement, they’ll find that their overly frequent blast messages will be quickly buried and forgotten.Facebook marketers should strive for quality over quantity, as only the posts and updates that have a high likelihood of being liked and shared many times over will receive a high score in the news feed algorithm.

According to Facebook’s own statistics, posting visually driven content can increase engagement by well over 100 percent. In addition, opinion-driven posts, such as surveys, polls or fill-in-the-blank questions can also increase user engagement by up to 90 percent. The most popular Facebook pages don’t do overkill; they usually post once or twice a day, but their posts are so engaging that the ripple effect among users lasts well into their subsequent updates.

Marketing via Twitter

On the other hand, the “breaking news” nature of Twitter makes it a prime platform for short-burst marketing messages. Although Twitter does have some conversational functionality, its interface isn’t as visually intuitive as that of Facebook when it comes to tracking a conversational thread. For this reason, businesses should focus their Twitter marketing efforts on making brand-specific announcements, releasing company news and highlighting specific business-related events. This is not to say that Twitter should not be used for interacting with customers, but rather its primary function should be that of a broadcasting medium for your business.

Both Facebook and Twitter are extremely powerful for businesses to further establish their online presence, and both can yield great dividends in terms of customer acquisition and engagement. Using the tips above will help your business effectively further its social media marketing goals.

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