Summary: Have you been wanting to dip your toe in the social media water, but don’t know where to start? Facebook and Twitter are great places to start. This article explains why you need to be active on both to have an effective social media presence.
The two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter, have changed how we use the Internet, and how we even interact with friends, family and customers.
Are you like many businesses – you gave Facebook ago, it didn’t work so you gave up and moved on? If this is you, you’re probably like most and have since moved on to Twitter. It’s true that Twitter is an excellent platform for businesses to communicate, but Facebook offers some things that Twitter doesn’t – and to be truly active online, I would say you need an active account on each. Facebook and Twitter have some of the highest daily users of all social networking platforms, and you will find different types of users on each platform. If you only choose one, you are missing out on a big opportunity to connect.
It is true that Facebook was previously, and still is used, by college students to network and communicate with each other. Facebook does seem the more personal social media tool whereas Twitter seem to be easier to use for business reasons. I think this is because on Twitter, you only have 140 characters to say something and that is enough to share links to your website, blog, etc – for many businesses it is the easy option because it doesn’t take much time to maintain. By contrast, the usual interaction for businesses on Facebook is to keep a personal and professional/fan page and/or group, and this can be a pain in terms of effort to maintain. It’s possible for this reason many business people have kept away from Facebook.
Facebook can do something that Twitter has deemed possible yet, creating lists and privacy settings. These two little things that Facebook enables every user to do enable them to have total control of who sees what on their profile, also meaning they don’t have to numerous different accounts/pages.
If you wanted to do this yourself, for your business, you would need to set up a Facebook account. Then, enter in all of your details and then create lists i.e. friends, family, business, customers etc and then you set what each group can see. i.e. you wouldn’t want your customers seeing your personal contact details or your family photos.
Also from your one Facebook profile you can create a business page and promote it on your profile and business website. Encourage your customers/fans to ‘like’ your business page and then when you write something on it, it goes direct to their news feed – this is also a great way to get your customers/fan interacting with you and means your business stays at the forefront of their minds because they are seeing your brand on a daily basis, where as they wouldn’t normally view your website on a daily basis.
Like Twitter, you need to encourage fans to ‘like’ (follow) your page, and engage with you. Post their comments on your wall. You need to make a community that everyone wants to be involved in and so they feel if they share their views and opinions you’ll take note and if needs be, make changes and improvements.
If you have different members of staff maintaining your page (Facebook gives you the option to give admin rights for your page to other users), it would be a good idea to have a dos and don’ts list – so every member of staff knows what is expected of them. It could include the following points:
- Every wall post/comment gets a reply from the company
- What to do if there is a big news story (industry specific or not)
- Your policy on other people’s work – do you promote other people’s articles – i.e. article of the day?
- You could also have a day of the week that you ask questions to your fans, to gain their opinions, competitions and giveaways.
Facebook and Twitter enable you to post photos. To promote the Company and as a great way to encourage engagement from followers, post regular photos of the Company at work, out at promotion events and also quirky goings on that show the Company’s personality (use your own judgement as to what sort of images are ok for your business).
Now for some quick pros and cons of Facebook and Twitter – If you have more, feel free to share below in the comment box.
Facebook pros
- Facebook has over 5 million users, with more than half of them active daily.
- Facebook is a community – everyone helps each, asks and answers questions
- Your posts show in your friends’ feeds, which encourages fast responses
- If set up correctly, Facebook can be like a marketing gold channel
- Things (news, promotions, etc) can spread very fast
- Facebook can be used on computers and mobile devices
- Anything can be posted i.e. links, photos, videos and articles.
- You can use the privacy settings to enable you to stop people seeing certain parts of your profile. Note: Business pages are viewable to everyone, even none-Facebook members.
- Business profiles are indexed in Google
- Facebook is the number one social network in the UK and America
Facebook cons
- Facebook can be a pain to maintain (more time consuming than Twitter)
- Facebook has a lot of games and fun applications – you don’t want your staff playing on these on company time!
- Facebook mods/developers enjoy changing things very regularly and don’t always consult the users – the changes made are not always popular ones.
Twitter pros
- Twitter is easy to use and maintain
- Twitter can be easily accessed on computers, ipads and mobile phones.
- Twitter appears in Google live search feeds
- Posts are 140 characters in length – great to promote links and quick one liners.
- It’s easy to share and re-tweet things
- It’s a great way to get out information quick
- Twitter is always current – on the right-hand side tends to be the top news stories and topics of the day
- It has more than 300,000 new users everyday! These are potential customers for you.
- Amazingly there are more than 50,000 third-party apps for Twitter
Twitter cons
- You need to be active daily – twitter followers are more fickle than Facebook, they don’t hang around long if you aren’t active.
- You Twitter one to one (direct message) or one to everyone – you can’t chat to a few people in the same conversation
- The 140 characters limit can sometimes be too short, although there are some great sites that enable you to have longer messages. Twitlonger, for when you talk too much for Twitter.
- It does have issues with being over capacity – this is due to Twitter starting as a simple text share service. It is improving all the time, although the fame fail whale can become annoying.
I would say to be actively engaging in social media activity any business needs to have an active account on both Facebook and Twitter because they offer different platforms, along with different users. If managed correctly they don’t take that much time each day and the engagement and feedback you can receive from them far outweighs the time the business is putting in.
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