Thursday, September 16, 2010
Facebook Verus Twitter
The e marketer newsletter had an interesting article the other day. It was titled Are Twitter followers better than Facebook followers? I read through the article and it spoke of how Twitter followers who follow a product online were buying that product 37 percent of the time compared to Facebook followers who only bought that product they 'liked' 17 percent. The argument is made that these numbers support how Twitter followers are better and they make up about 3 percent of what Facebook does. However the article also says how Facebook followers are more typical of an average consumer. Ahem.. I'm sorry, so you're saying the choice i have is marketing my $ towards a very small market who is more apt to buy but not at all reflective of the general public or spend that money advertising to a large demographic to see what works? Is that even a question? Either way it's going to have to be a great marketing campaign to get people to buy in but if I'm spending money I'm going to go ahead and get that 17 percent of 400 million and you can have the 40 percent of 15 million. let's see that equals out to be about 5.55 million for Twitter and 68 Million for Facebook. If you have a wildly successful marketing campaign you might sell 75 percent of the market (generous numbers) so that puts Twitter at 11 million. So even at Twitters best they cannot compete. (After further research it's estimated that there are 18 million users on twitter but still, not even close) So I'll let you decide, would you rather have 600 percent more sales or a higher loyalty base? It's not an exclusive club people, it's just bad business to advertise on Twitter. I'll put it like this would you rather spend the same amount of money advertising on Twitter (not actually on twitter or Facebook but on setting up applications and email for followers. The money isn't in getting people to follow or like you but the follow up) which would be a bulletin board at a elementary school, or a billboard off of the freeway?
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We are going to cover social media in more detail later on, but you raise some great questions in your nice post. Marketers are just getting their hands around metrics for social media sites. The numbers are deceptive. We live in a country with +310,000,000 people, and even netwrok TV can draw 10 million viewers. So when a company brags about having 507 followers or even 1,000,000, what are we talking about? The "old" advertising model is based on "number of possible viewes," this being called "impressions." The new Internet-based advertising needs to and can go way beyond this with much more specific data: who, when, where, how long, where did you come from and where to you go before and after visiting?
ReplyDeleteYou raise some interesting points.
ReplyDeleteAs a rookie to Facebook (started about four months ago) and an absolute newbie to Twitter (have been Tweeting for about four days), I see them as two totally different animals.
From my perspective, perhaps a distinction between these two leaders in social networking -- and one very important to marketers -- is the ease of a Facebook user to simply click "Like". This is an almost passive gesture; once it's done, there's not much of a commitment.
On the other hand, choosing to "Follow" someone/something on Twitter is a bit more of a commitment. This series of Tweets gets added to the continual bombardment. At first it's fun; but the ones that don't really matter are easily "Unfollowed".
But the important point, as Jim mentioned above, is what is said/done with these tools. I have witnessed both savvy and lame efforts by businesses on both of these vehicles. It's a bit of a "Wild West" right now, The future will be interesting.
Great post! Phil made a good point about the ease of a Facebook user to simply click "Like." I simply chose Facebook over Twitter because of that very same reason.
ReplyDeleteI am sort of a veteran Facebook user. I started in 2005, when you had to have a college e-mail address in order to join. It was a relief from all the Myspace people out there and it began with virtually no sponsors and it grew in popularity because college kids like me loved the idea that it was a 'college' social network. It was sort of exclusive and the majority of users were between 18-24. But times change and it grew into Myspace 2 and now i am friends with two toddlers on Facebook (mt Nieces) and am constantly bombarded with high schoolers bombarding Facebook with "like". That statement used to be much more meaningful in the Facebook realm but like all outlets , marketing money was luring and it sold out. Not really about marketing but interesting none the less.
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