Did I Just Twitter A Facebook?

Something I wrote a while back :) ....Still useful info...

I mean facebook a tweet, no! Tweet a facebook post?

Technology is amazing, but I’m sure we’ve all felt like the 3 guys from Office space at one time or another.

Managing your organizations social media account can feel like a shot in the dark sometimes, confusing and time consuming. Unless you are a recent college graduate, you probably don’t have any formal social media training. If you’re in the advertising/marketing industry you probably have a basic understanding of the functionalities and capabilities that are available to you on facebook and twitter (due to your personal use). You might even use facebook chat as the primary tool of in-office communication. Which might sound crazy to some, but many agencies actually do.

The goal of this post is to give you some insight into how about how consumers are posting/interacting differently on facebook vs. Twitter in order to facilitate the different types of communication that have established by each social network.

The primary difference between facebook and Twitter is that facebook acts as a community or hub for constant brand presence in the form of a conversation. Facebook has a past, for those who like to reminisce over old pictures, a present, where engaging content is exchanged in return for consumer attention (their precious time), and a future, undefined and open to innovation. As Brain Solis puts it, “Facebook allows for richer, more interactive experiences hosted within the confines of a branded and captive environment.”  This means that you have the opportunity to engage in a more complex in-depth conversation with people than you would on twitter. This does not mean your status updates should be longer, it means the experience itself should spark interaction and communication between fans, not even necessarily between the fan and the brand. I am a firm believer in the idea that everyone has a story they want to share and they are just looking for the right platform to share it on. Make your page, something they obviously have some kind of emotional attachment to or passion about, a place for them to open up and tell their stories. Learn to facilitate conversation, don’t speak AT people.  (Studies show that statuses with 80 or less characters have the highest engagement….Don’t believe me? Take a look at Redbull’s posts)

Twitter is the pulse of business; it gauges your real-time relevance with consumers and helps to keep your brand top of mind. More importantly, it allows you to listen and respond to conversations about your brand or industry. We’ll get into more detail about how to spike engagement on twitter later, but for right now, a good question to ask yourself before you tweet is: Would I find this tweet useful? Entertaining? Interesting? If not…don’t tweet it 

Advances in technology have made it easier than ever to communicate with more people than ever. Yet there is no specific road map for social media success, so your success with these new tools for communication will still depend on social science and your ability to decipher YOUR customers social media behavior.