BrandSavant

Gaining Insight From Social Media Data

The Easy Button

by Tom Webster on March 28, 2011

Red button, Bridgewater Place, GRThree facts, held together briefly, create a conflict:

Facebook now reaches the majority (51%) of Americans 12+ (not just online Americans)

Eight percent of those same Americans 12+ currently use Twitter

Amongst the Fortune Global 100 companies, more have Twitter accounts (77%) than Facebook accounts (61%)

Facebook is hard. I certainly won’t claim to have cracked it. With most Facebook users opting for the default, Edgerank-generated newsfeed (which prioritizes content from those persons/accounts with whom you interact with most), you can poke and like your face off, and still be essentially invisible to many of your prospects and customers.

Twitter, on the other hand, is all about instant gratification. You tweet something out, and you get retweeted. You dutifully record those retweets as evidence of some form of engagement. You track the clicks, and tally the mentions. Easy. Thus, I suppose it isn’t too surprising that so many of the FG100 companies are using Twitter, but still – the disparity between Facebook and Twitter users, and the difference between FG100 Facebook and Twitter accounts, is oddly high.

Certainly, if you are a consumer brand, it probably makes sense to spend five times more effort on increasing your Facebook presence as you do your Twitter presence, but the lure of Twitter and its profligate weak ties is sometimes too hard to resist. Twitter is like the marketer’s great “easy button” for the Internet – but often, when you push it, you get another marketer. If that’s your strategy, then you have no worries – but if you need to reach consumers directly, then statistics like those presented above are a little too vivid to ignore.

How do you divide your time between the two? How do you judge the differential quality of those efforts?

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  • http://www.convinceandconvert.com jaybaer

    I think the inbalance stems from Twitter’s role as a customer service option of last resort. ExactTarget’s study on “Twtter X Factors” found that customers rarely use Twitter as a first or second option (email and phone, in some order); but often use Twitter as a Hail Mary pass when frustrated by ham-handed customer service provision in typical channels.

    You don’t really see that same role for Facebook today (although I advocate that there should be, since Facebook has far more usage and is a superior vehicle for service since you can actually download stuff and such).

    Consequently, Twitter is more like a fax machine. Companies gotta have one, even if it’s not widely used. Facebook is more like a watered down version of your website, with an unthreaded discussion board bolted on the front (in most cases).

  • http://jivaldi.com Marketing Gal

    I am ashamed to admit, I facebook my butt off, but I do not have a Twitter account set up. I guess with these numbers, I need to get on it ! This is on my personal side, not business !

  • http://twitter.com/DrRahlf dane rahlf

    Companies have a larger challenge with social media than Brands. Brands can be engaging, entertaining and persuasive. Finding value in a facebook “like,” I feel, is much more difficult than finding value in twitter followers. Perhaps, this is why Fortune Companies favor twitter more.

  • http://www.mynotetakingnerd.com/blog Lewis LaLanne aka Nerd #2

    I just was studying a program that talked about how Facebook is awesome for reaching the stay at home mom crowd but like you mentioned, if they stick to the most recent feed, then unless you do a magnificent job engaging them, you’ll never be seen.

    The thing that’s also so tricky about Twitter is that unless you’re DM or @replying you’re totally at the mercy of people being right in front of the stream at the time you tweeted. So unless you’ve got a social media manager that’s retweeking your tweets so the same message goes out 4 different ways at the times people are wasting time, your message is the tree falling in the empty forest with no one to hear it.

    Where the money is, if you’re looking to engage the country club crowd (professionals – lawyers, CEO’s, architects) is LinkedIn. These people are gonna spend more time with people “like” them than with the “Kids” or “stay at home moms” on Facebook.

    Those stats you presented at the start of the post were awesome! Thanks for sharing them and helping me become even more away of this marketing media!

  • http://jasonkeath.com Jason Keath

    Facebook is hard. Blogging is harder. I would wager Youtube is even more difficult, but most F100 have the resources to take a stab at Youtube OR more likely existing creative they can leverage.

    I think when a company really masters a corporate blog they tend to “get” the rest of the platforms and opportunities.

  • http://davezilla.com/ Dave Linabury

    We’ve been quite successful with Facebook. We tend to use it for focused experiences for the customer. For example, we have 15 Facebook pages for the US Navy, each one dedicated to a specific graduate program career. These careers were tough for the military to fill (like doctors, lawyers, physicists, etc.). By dedicating each page to only one career—and having Navy professionals in that career answering all the Wall questions—Facebook was able to do a better job than a recruiter. We even got direct conversions (Ex. “Sign me up now, I’m ready!”) on the Wall which wasn’t expected, but happened often enough that we created a new process to handle it.

  • http://thinkbrief.com Mick Gill

    Unless your an uber interesting brand on either Facebook or Twitter, People will just hide your posts or view your tweets occasionally!

    On Facebook I follow a lot of pages but only view about 5 on a regular basis!

  • Anonymous

    As a consumer, I don’t want companies on facebook. Facebook, for all it’s lack of easy to use privacy options*, still remains at it’s root a place to converge with people. I think business that use Facebook as their primary web presence are lame. For instance the Dead Island video game when it first premiered had it’s only presence in the form of a YouTube video/channel and a Facebook page.

    So my first point is that using Facebook as your website is missing the mark.

    My second and more pertinent point is that Twitter works better as a communication tool for a business. Facebook is far to annoying for me to spend much time there but from what I can tell Business FB Pages are just mini forums. If I want to go somewhere to talk about say my favorite tv show as a kid there’s a page for that, and it in that capacity it works. Barely tolerable forums but the lack of ‘additional login’ helps. But when I want to interact with a current company I don’t want it filling up my timeline. That’s how timelines become all noise and no signal (intelligent filtering or not).

    Twitter has been shown (from anecdotal experience) to be a much better venus for me to communicate directly to a company. I can talk to a company, they can talk back to me. What I find interesting is that while incorporation turns a company into a legal person (with all attached rights), Twitter allows a company to act as a person online. I can talk to say TorBooks on twitter engage in conversation with an official identity and on my side that’s great. On their side it’s the same thing but without having to have a risk of a spokesman.

    Facebook on the other hand while I can begrudgingly admit it works as a way for fans of Tor books to get together. Loses with consumer engagement. You can’t talk with the TorBooks facebook page with the same ideal level of intimacy of Twitter. Direct Message might as well be e-mail and that’s too formal, posting on each other’s walls is too chaotics and informal. Talking on the ‘discussion’ pages is just too public.

    * FB’s idea of privacy.. I can make a photo album, make it so only 7 friends can see it… yet anyone who gets the ‘link’ at the bottom can view the images. There is no way to make a private album like you can with say a YT video.

  • Anonymous

    I wouldn’t even say ‘last resort’ I think as word spreads twitter can become a first resort. For instance in my circles online twitter can act as a switchboard that mail/phone can’t.

    Twitter has the potential to get a fast response. From the consumer side that’s great. You can tweet to MayTag about a faulty washer and get a response back relatively quickly in virtual realtime without tying up resources. That response not matter what the outcome reflects good on your company and that spreads word of mouth style. I’m sure companies love that.

    The ‘imbalance’ you speak of and twitter as a ‘last resort’ are of course compared to traditional contact vectors, but if you look at just social networks (which realistically are dominated by Twitter and Facebook) then Twitter is riding high where Facebook, in this respect, is barely a blip. A lot of people may /LIKE/ Dentyne for a free pack of gum but almost none of them would put up a message if there was a problem with the pack they just got or anything like that.

    This actually reminds me of a third point and while this is arguably a more personal point. I maintain that twitter still had a much better method of noise reduction. On twitter is fairly doable to separate people into ‘lists’. FB has groups but (if i recall correctly) you can’t really use those groups to filter the noise coming in. You have to trust their auto filtering for the most part if you want that. Just because I don’t interact with person A all the time doesn’t mean they aren’t one of the people who’s stream is unimportant to me.

  • Anonymous

    +++
    The thing that’s also so tricky about Twitter is that unless you’re DM or @replying you’re totally at the mercy of people being right in front of the stream at the time you tweeted. So unless you’ve got a social media manager that’s retweeking your tweets so the same message goes out 4 different ways at the times people are wasting time, your message is the tree falling in the empty forest with no one to hear it. +++

    So the idea you’re discussing here isn’t entirely wrong but facebook a) has the same problem and b) has less effective solutions. The basic solution to the problem of getting lost in the noise is to get your signal repeated.

    The first solution is to get your fans to repeat it for you. On facebook the most common way to do this is to ‘like’ a status update. On twitter the most common way to do this is to “RT” the update. On this level Twitter is more effective. Oddly enough RTs are almost never butchered in spite of how easy that would be to do. People who RT your message generally keep it intact creating mini-Meme saves in the twittersphere. Each time it’s RT’d new people are seeing your message, and usually getting sourced back to your account (if not the direct status link). Facebook does have the advantage where if I see someone liked something I can find that exact update. If my friend likes a status by Burger King and I’m not into Burger King I don’t see the update I just see you liked something. Far more effective to risk RT contamination (which again I’ve never heard off outside of an oddly stirring @AzizAnsari:twitter joke) and get your message to propagate.

    The second solution is to repeat the signal yourself. I honestly don’t know how well Facebook apps support this, but I know many many twitter applications support multiple handlers, and scheduled messages. @hootsuite:twitter and @Cotweet:twitter for one support attaching an account and allowing multiple people to manage it including assigning responses to specific people. They each support facebook to a degree but culturally tweeting the same message is far more acceptable (to a degree) vs posting the same Facebook status update.

    I fully agree with you about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is what facebook was shaping up to be before the Application-Boom and unrestricted accounts. All of which were good for FB’s investors but bad for the user.

  • http://www.posao123.com/ Posao 123

    Hi Tom,I fully agree with you about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is what facebook was
    shaping up to be before the Application-Boom and unrestricted accounts.
    All of which were good for FB’s investors but bad for the user.

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