According to a recent study reported by e-Marketer, online marketers are using Twitter much more than Facebook to reach their potential customers.
A July 2009 study of Fortune 100 companies by Burson-Marsteller showed that 54 percent of the studied companies had a presence on Twitter, compared to just 29 percent on Facebook. In addition, 32 percent were reported as owning a corporate blog.
One-fifth of all the Fortune 100 companies reviewed used only one of the three channels for their online marketing. Of this portion, over three-quarters were apt to choose Twitter over Facebook. Only 14 percent said they would pick Facebook as their sole online marketing channel, and just 10 percent chose blogging.
Of those companies that were using two of the three channels, the top combination was Twitter and a corporate blog.
The study revealed the companies were making use of Twitter for at least four main purposes: company news, customer service, marketing promotions, and employee recruitment.
Even e-mail marketers are more likely to use Twitter over Facebook, according to another study, with links to Twitter being far more common than links to Facebook in US-based e-mail campaigns from March to July 2009. The study was performed by Email Data Source. It must be noted, however, that in January and February of this year, Facebook won out with almost double the e-mail links in the same campaigns.
E-marketer reports that links to both Facebook and Twitter have skyrocketed in 2009, but “Twitter’s rise has been more dramatic.”
The preference for corporations to make use of Twitter over Facebook could be to do with Twitter’s more mature feel, which may appeal to corporate culture better than Facebook’s younger, hipper platform, which appeals much more to the younger generation. That could be why Facebook’s recent changes have made it look more and more like Twitter, and it even tried to by the company out, albeit without success. However, the two sites do retain fundamental differences that make them appeal to different groups (though many people do indulge in both sites simultaneously).
Facebook and Twitter’s popularity was highlighted by the UK’s Telegraph in March of this year, where it reported that more people logged in to these member-community websites than they did their own e-mail service in December 2008. The research was done by Nielsen Online. The report states that it seems these sites have become a more convenient way to stay connected than e-mail.
Because of the growing popularity of these online social networking sites, the Twitter/ Facebook rivalry is almost as exciting as the Google/ Microsoft one. Yes, Facebook had a head-start over Twitter, in the same way that Microsoft had a head-start over Google, but that doesn’t seem to have given them any hugely competitive edge. It will certainly be interesting to sit back and see how this one plays out.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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