First of all, I just want to make it clear that I adore both of these two innovative social media properties. Even though, I’ve noticed that the past year was all about the Twitter. Actually, it’s quite crazy how much coverage it has received from social media citizens compare to its “big brother”. Therefore, just to make it fare I’ll try to identify 5 main reasons which makes Facebook superior social media platform over the Twitter.

The 5 Reasons:

Size. Does the size matter? Well it does in Social Media or in fact in any media. In terms of the audience and reach there is quite a big difference between Facebook’s 400 millions and Twitter’s 75 millions users. Moreover with the Twitter’s growth slowing down up to just 3.5 % a month it’s seems its going to be very difficult to catch up with the social networking behemoth.

Engagement & Interactivity. We can argue that both social media properties are similarly engaging, but clearly they are not. The time spent on site statistics clearly show that Facebook users tend to spend much more time engaging than on Twitter. Mainly it happens due to the different nature of the platforms (micro-blogging vs social networking) which will be discussed later on the post.

Transparency & Personality. Facebook compare to Twitter offers much greater transparency mainly due to variety of content it is able to support on the site. Users can store and share much more information about themselves in order to show who they really are or more importantly for marketers how they want to be seen (creating needs in real time). The shared information is much more sensitive and personal. As a result, it enables the brands to build more personal and sensitive communities. As we all know social is all about sentiment and emotion.

Features. A response to recent post “3 Reasons why Twitter is better than Facebook” by Shaun Worcester  is – I disagree. Facebook has all the futures of Twitter, unfortunately not the other way round (just yet). Of course, we can argue that there are all these related Twitter services, but in terms of service quality Facebook is integral platform providing all the experiences within the site.

Innovation. Ok people may hate changing layouts and features on Facebook, but theses slight innovations keep Facebook fresh and new. It’s important to have that “newness” surrounding the brand as everyone want to be a part of something new. I can’t say that Twitter is not trying to keep up with Facebook (lists, retweet, new profile view feature is coming), but it seems that Facebook’s drastic changes creates more buzz and more buzz attracts more users to Facebook

Two different platforms

Having said all that, I still believe that both of these platforms are vital for successful social media strategy implementation as they are supplementing rather than substituting each other. It’s a tricky thing to compare these two social media properties bearing in mind that they have originated form completely different backgrounds and therefore have different functional communication objectives:

• Twitter has clearly originated or evolved from mIRC. Remember all the “#channels” lists or channel “status updates” by admins. Even the syntaxy is all the same as in mIRC: “#”, “@” ant etc. I would dare to say it’s mIRC “2.0” as it is all about chatting online. It is a chat/news channel.
• Facebook has obviously evolved from the dating site/network concept. It’s all about building and maintaining relationships, actually this clever strategic move from concentrating on creating “new”  relationships to maintaining and utilizing “existing” relationships is one of the main differentiators from them competitors. However, it is still a relationship building channel.

Of course, both of these social media properties has evolved over the time and the lines blurred between them, but its quite important to remember  their roots in order to use them efficiently.