Facebook and Twitter are no doubt the biggest social media platforms in the world today. With billions of users and valued at billions of dollars, both keep introducing novel ideas to retain users as well as attract new ones. These giant tech companies have changed social interaction and engagements forever. You can now get instant feedback for any requests or complaints.
Regardless, Facebook and Twitter explore different strategies and technique to achieve user satisfaction. If you have both apps on your phone, which one will you use often or let’s say which one do you think is better? Certainly, both companies are nosing into each others affairs to determine how they can outshine each other. In fact, few months ago, Twitter announced that it may allow users to tweet beyond the usual 140 characters.
Facebook have more users than twitter. Facebook has 1.59 billion active users while twitter has 320 million. It is an all-in-one social media network for writing verbose posts, sharing pictures, watching videos and reading news. Facebook is not difficult to use at all. Very simple and easy including opening an account. Also, the Facebook messenger can be downloaded to chat with friends.
Twitter carved a completely different niche for itself. Vocabularies like tweets, trends, followers, unfollow, tweet meets, handles, hashtags (#) and influencers are associated with the social network. There is no room for long stories on twitter. You have to KISS i.e. Keep It Short and Simple because you have only 140 characters to tweet your thoughts and feelings. Although there are tools that can help you tweet longer, only a few people use it. They prefer to stick with the 140 characters. This character limitation also has its shortcomings. You may need a crash course to use twitter.
Which is better?
It may be a bit difficult to say which is better, with these three ideas- audience, engagement/awareness, and impact we leave to decide which is better.
Audience
You can use Facebook to search for family and friends which is not possible with twitter. It can reconnect you with them long lost friends. You can search for their profiles. The likelihood of your friend being on Facebook is high compared to twitter. In the terrorist attack in Paris recently, Facebook activate its safety check. This helped victims to click on the safety button to signify that they are safe. Hence, if a friend or family member searches for their friends, they will know they are safe. The safety check connects you with friends and loved ones during a disaster.
You cannot do this on twitter. Twitter audience or users will get up-to-date and breaking news, know the top trending issues being discuss and also follow or unfollow influencers and celebrities. You find more celebrities on twitter than Facebook and they all have verified accounts. You can safely stress that Facebook is for everyone while twitter is for intellectually minded persons.
Engagement and awareness
Any brand that is absent on either Facebook or twitter is considered unserious. Same with individuals. With the trends on twitter, you can share your post at particular times of the day to drive engagement and interaction. There are tools that can help schedule your tweets and post them at the time of the day where will garner more traffic. There are also trends on Facebook. But when it comes to trends, twitter dominates. You can create hashtags on specific topics which can go viral. For example, social media was used to break the news of sexual harassment in Queens College, a Federal government school in Nigeria. Using the #QueensCollege, the topic of sexual harassment became one of the most talked about issues in Nigeria. It went viral and drew the attention of the government and the police. Even though both social media networks played important roles in creating public awareness about social issues, twitter can sustain be used to sustain and maintain the momentum.
Impact measurement
The impact of Facebook and twitter cannot be overemphasized. Governments of some countries in various parts of the globe have blocked access to these networks or have a tight control over them. Anyone that tweets or post anti-government sentiments may end up in jail. This said, the degree of impact twitter and Facebook can have is quite significant. You can measure the impact of a campaign through the response of your audience. Twitter seems to be the perfect tool for measuring impact due to its 140 characters and it always appear to trigger a response from the authorities. An example is the outcry of Nigerians over the kidnap of Ese Oruru. Nigerians vented their grouse with the kidnap with #FreeEseOruruNow. The impact of the hashtag reverberated as it prompted the government and police to rescue or free Ese from his alleged captor. Nothing of such happened on Facebook.
