innovative communication for innovative communicators

At a presentation I gave yesterday I was put on the spot to explain the difference between Facebook and Twitter, and particular what the difference was between a Facebook status update and a tweet.

Thinking on one’s feet can be an energizing experience, or a slow and painful death, depending on a whole swag of circumstances.

How many times have you been asked a question that you think you can answer easily and then turn out to stumble over it, baffling the person who asked the question? Your own hard-won knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I stumbled my way through an answer, but I wasn’t happy with it, and the question nagged at me all the way home.

At its simplest, a Facebook status update is different from a twitter update (aka tweet) because only your Facebook ‘friends’ can see your update, whereas the whole world can see your tweet should they so wish.

But that is also an incorrect definition, because any one of your friends can ‘share’ some of your updates, particularly if you have links to a video or webpage in them. This then enables your message to be seen by more people than just your immediate circle of friends.

So by this circuitous route I was brought back to the reason for the original question: which has a better ROI? Which would be better for a busy marketer to focus their attention on?

As Steve Thornton and a zillion commenters point out, the two are very different and come with pros and cons (see Steve’s post for a useful list).

In the context of the audience on the day, I think that the best one to use is the one you feel most comfortable using, because I see two main pros and cons for each:

Twitter
con: small user base
pro: populated by higher-educated, influential and socially well-connected individuals (see Roger’s work on innovation for my justification for this; in a nutshell the early adopters of technology are most usually socially well-connected and influential individuals).

Facebook
pro: massive, segmentable audience numbers (9.3m in Australia as I type)
con: it takes time and a concerted effort to create a Page that is enticing enough that people will want to ‘like’ it and thus give you permission to market to them, plus you have to consistently and repeatedly use that channel, offering compelling content (which can take time to create) which hopefully they will like so much they will ‘share’ with their ‘friends’.

The costs involved with either channel are not hard to determine: Time and Money.

Time
It can take time to pull together content that will engage others. Let us not forget that unless you have a brand that your audience already adores and are hungry to interact with online, you are dealing with a faceless and cynical audience (particularly so in Australia). It takes time to build up credibility and trust in you and your organisation/brand; it cannot be bought cheaply with give-aways and competitions.

However, once you have your online content creation processes in place, the amount of time it takes to create content can be reduced (as long as the quality of the output doesn’t suffer). Tweeting links to great content can take as little as ten seconds.

Money
Both Facebook and Twitter cost nothing to use and be a part of their respective online environments. But where Twitter continues to cost next to nothing (you can spend the first 15 minutes of the day finding something to tweet about and tweet it, leaving the rest of the day to your ‘normal’ activities, and services like SocialOomph allow you to create your tweets in advance of their release date/time), Facebook requires on-going investment of money in the form of human resource to create the content (videos, white papers, news updates, inter alia) and post it online.

The answer I gave to the client

In the end, the answer I gave to the client regarding their ROI question is probably the correct one: there is no answer, at least not yet.

Social media is such a new communication landscape that the rules are being made up as we go along, and what worked last month may not work this month.

Does that create confusion and frustration for marketers and result-hungry CEOs? Absolutely. Does that create pressure for consultants to promise ‘golden results’? Absolutely, and you will no doubt find any number of ‘experts’ who will promise you dazzling results from a social marketing campaign (and do I want to strangle ‘experts’ who think in ‘campaign’ terms when it comes to social media, rather than seeing that social media is an on-going conversation with the marketplace? Absolutely!).

But here’s the thing: as any marketer will tell you if you ply them with enough alcohol and fool them into thinking that you’re not listening, marketing is an inexact science; no-one can predict what the market place will do because the market place is populated by those annoying creatures called human beings. These human beings come with all manner of idiotic errors of judgement, emotional buttons (most of them hidden from view) and flawed logic circuits.

Marketers cannot tell you the exact ROI of their brochures because there are just too many variables that lead to a purchasing decision.

And so social mediarists like myself cannot give your CEO an exact ROI because human beings create the variables that befuddle even themselves. The best we can do is look at online behaviour, help you decide what it is you want out of your social media activities and help you determine if you have got there yet.

But what we can’t do is tell you in advance whether Twitter is going to be a better bet for you than Facebook. Sorry.

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