The online marketing space is heating up like never before. Social networking sites are going all out to attract the maximum people onto their networking platform. Currently, perched on the top is Facebook with more than 500 million members and the growth is quite phenomenal. But before it became a one horse race, Twitter has made a grand impact in the social networking sphere. Both are tussling with each other to get the bigger bite of the cake. But who's winning?
Where on one hand, Facebook is as best as social networking can get, Twitter on the other hand has come up light a bolt from the blue. It really has taken the web by storm with millions of tweets being made every hour. Tweeple is what the users are calling themselves! It is a well known fact that websites generate their revenue from the online ads that they display and both Twitter and Facebook are employing innovative ways to come up with unique forms of promotional activity for businesses. In this tug-o-war of marketing, the marketer is left in a fix as to which platform to employ to get maximum impact out of his/her online marketing activity.
Facebook from a users perspective, is the coolest thing ever to happen online. People are completely hooked onto this network and marketers are justifiably exploiting this space to spread the word about their product/service. Facebook already has a well structured and very simple ad mechanism in place. But apart from this, it remains the work of the online marketer to use the indirect ways of promoting the brand.
Facebook offers Fan-pages, groups and profiles as a medium to promote oneself. Also it offers multiple ways of promoting ones' brand and is a very communicative tool for marketing. Those who have been successful at realizing the potential of these tools have already gained immensely from it. Fan-pages and groups allow the company to converse directly with their target market and involve them with all the company activities. These fan pages can be converted into interactive hubs with almost every kind of information being disseminated through this medium. Once they have the people hooked, it becomes a matter of time until the Fan becomes a customer.
Twitter in comparison has gone in for drastic innovation in terms of how people talk to each other online. Twitter can be called as a partially geeky (with its @ symbols and formulaic syntax) yet highly entertaining and engaging medium. Updates on Twitter are immediate and sometimes highly enriching. The uniqueness of Twitter is its biggest USP. Facebook is cool. While some people are drawn to geeky things, more people are drawn to cool things. It's as simple as that. The author points out that Twitter is more "geeky" because it's unique, whereas Facebook is much more "common", and then points out five reasons why Facebook marketing is far superior to marketing on Twitter.
That being said, a study has shown that Twitter may be a better online marketing medium than Facebook. Market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies revealed that nearly 20 percent more Twitter users were likely to recommend the brands they followed than Facebook users (60 percent of Facebook users, compared to 79 percent of Twitter followers).
Twitter and Facebook remain two very different marketing platforms and what works on one of them might not work on the other. But one can never rule out the option of using both the platforms at the same time for a successful promotional activity. The web space is replete with examples of companies which have excellently executed their Social media marketing plans by using both these platforms. In the end, effective user engagement remains the key.
