Twitter or Facebook: When You Have to Choose One
You’re a busy person. Between your work and home lives, your hobbies and other responsibilities, you don’t have a lot of free time for building your brand online. Both Twitter and Facebook are good options, you’ve heard, but you only have the time to devote to one. Which do you choose?
The answer to that question depends on a few factors. For starters, are you using social media sites to build your personal brand, or to promote your company’s brand? While businesses can do amazing things with an active Twitter profile, many of them do their best work on Facebook, thanks to their ability to create custom tabs on their profile. Personal branding is often easier to do on Twitter, unless you’re creating two separate Facebook profiles– one for your personal life and one for the professional side of things. People are more likely to follow a business on Facebook than they are to follow a person’s page (unless that person is already well-known). On Twitter, however, personal brands flourish. The environment is built for making new connections and building a personal following.
Who is your target audience? Facebook is more popular with the less technically-savvy crowd. Your grandmother is probably not on Twitter, but there’s a growing possibility that she’s on Facebook. Twitter isn’t for everyone, but if that’s where your market is, that’s where you need to be.
How are you trying to engage your audience? If you want to go for the personal, one-on-one approach, you need to be using Twitter. Twitter makes it easy to follow discussions about your brand, and allows you to interact with anyone, whether they are currently following you or not. It’s an open forum, and, as a brand, that gives you a lot of freedom and opportunity that isn’t as readily available on Facebook.
Facebook, however, is great for engaging people as a crowd. When a brand wants to get a conversation going, or wants to get massive amounts of feedback, Facebook is the way to go. When a brand asks a question on their page, everyone who “likes” them sees it, and has an opportunity to respond.
Ideally, you’ll create a presence on both social media sites. They are both essential parts of a successful online marketing campaign. But if you really have to pick one or the other, you need to pick the one that is going to place you in front of the biggest percentage of your target audience and the one that will be best for delivering your message. Not sure which one that is? Test them both out, and go with the site that seems to best fit your needs.
