Twitter or Facebook?

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by: Mark Rogers

The scene is the playground at my wife’s school in Oxford in the 1980s. Two children put their arms around each other’s shoulders, they start chanting: “Anybody want to play kiss-chase?” As each child joins they put their arms around the shoulders of a child at either end of the line they join in with the chant: “Anybody want to play kiss chase?” The chant gets louder, so more of the other children can hear. Finally enough people had gathered for a game of kiss-chase. The line breaks up and the game begins.

This is a nice emblem for social marketing.

You try to find a group of people who like what you like, do what you do. You belong to the group not for itself, necessarily, but perhaps because you want something to happen. You want to bring back the Wispa chocolate bar. You want Dell to carry on shipping PCs with Windows XP. But you could simply be celebrating your love of Van Morrison or Rock Band.

Of course Dell and Cadbury and Van Morrison may want to join in – not as members – but they may think – we should talk to these folk, they want to talk to us …

How to start that conversation? How to sustain it?

Facebook has real challenges for marketers. Brands can’t join as individuals. It is expensive to open a channel and very hard to measure the impact of what you do. Marketeers – including in our own client base are reviewing alternatives like Twitter. So how do the channels compare?

How effective Twitter is depends what you are trying to do. Twitter is best viewed as a channel through which to reach an existing audience – one that has formed spontaneously elsewhere.

Facebook manages the cohesion of people around an idea or interest – the forming of that playground group – Twitter simply allows it. In principle that makes Facebook the superior option, but its high price and the opacity of the metrics it offers make other options attractive.

The attraction of monitoring existing conversations about you and marketing your Twitter feeds to these groups is that you can track your following and the direct responses to your messages. You have control; no one is taxing your ability to talk to the market. So in the long run, for marketers, Twitter wins.

Original Post: http://www.marketsentinel.com/blog/2008/05/twitter-or-facebook