eSpire Marketing

Twitter or Facebook? This fight has been brewing for the past year or so since Twitter had it’s big coming out party when Dell told everyone they made $1,000,000 on their Twitter account last year. I read the article recently 5 Reasons Twitter Will Take over Facebook while they made some great points. While this image might be a bit much I’m here to give you the 5 Reasons Twitter Won’t Take over Facebook.

1. Applications: While Twitter has cool outside ways to enjoy Twitter and post pictures and all of that jazz, Facebook has many more on site applications that are more relevant to its user base. Think about it, look in your latest news feed, you’ll see that 4 or 5 of your friends just played around with a quiz application to figure out which Harry Potter character they are more likely to be. It is so much easier to connect to all of the things you love, in so many different ways, through Facebook than it is on Twitter.
2. Search for Old Friends: Twitter has a great search engine for finding other people who are interested or talking about the same things that you are. Facebook needs to integrate that type of search technology into their site. BUT, when it comes to locating old friends, Facebook takes the cake. I constantly am looking for people that I know on Twitter, and since you don’t readily have all of their information available on Twitter, those old friends are hard to locate. Both sites need to take notes from each other’s sites to improve these features. Facebook has twitter dominated in this front
3. Picture Albums: The use of picture albums on Facebook is awesome. Once you post a photo album all of your friends can go back at any time to take a look at those old photos. Twitter has the ability to share photos (and videos) but only in real time. Once a photo has moved far enough down a users timeline, the photo is virtually lost. Again Facebook is killing twitter in the photo sharing realm.
4. 140 Characters or More: Well we all know that Twitter allows you to tell a story in 140 characters or less. But Facebook gives you the opportunity to share a story in more detail without having a blog. You can write and create entire notes on Facebook. If you wanted to do that on Twitter, you’d have to have a whole series of successive tweets, and the story is likely to get lost in most of your twitter followers’ timelines. Facebook 4 Twitter 0.
5. More Brands in More Places: While Twitter allows a brand to create a twitter page, Facebook allows brands to create all sorts of fun pages, applications, and you can even connect your website directly to Facebook. I know we all like to think that Brands follow consumers, and that is true for the smaller brands, but pop-culture and big brands, drive what we do. And let’s face it, being able to design a custom t-shirt on a website, and then send it directly for all of your friends to see on Facebook, is much cooler than just telling people about it on Twitter.

Both of these sites have a lot they can learn from each other. But for the foreseeable future, Facebook is King. And until it’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg decides to sell it and take the money, it’s going to continue to grow at a great pace. He and everyone at Facebook are cutting edge. Twitter relies on everyone else to come up with their ideas and try and implement them. I’ll leave the comment board for all of you to debate this further.