Twitter: It’s Temporary Nature and Your Marketing

I read and hear a lot of talk about how a Facebook post is worth more than a twitter post. That is worthless, time wasting, inconsequential analysis. Here is why:

You are marketing a good or a service, to sell as much of it as you possibly can. So if your facebook marketing sells 90% of your total and twitter makes up 10% are you in a position to give that 10% away? I didn’t think so.
Posting to Twitter and Facebook etc is free or nearly free. You are not saving advertising or marketing dollars by ignoring Twitter. This isn’t a choice to focus on one medium because you can’t afford to do both. You can.
You should worry about what tools work, not which one works the best. Facebook has a ton more users, and thus it is natural that a post on Facebook has more potential for driving sales. But does Twitter drive sales too? Yes. So you should be using it.
There is an incredible difference in the platforms, one which allows misleading bias for the sake of the comparison above. Facebook has much more permanence than Twitter. Meaning that if this morning you posted the exact same thing on both networks, this evening many many many more of your Facebook friends would still see it prominently displayed in their feeds when compared to how many of your twitter followers would still see that morning post 8 hours later. That brings me to my argument on this topic:

Twitter is more ‘Temporary’ than Facebook

You should not try to use it in the same way. This understanding of the two services is critical to realizing your marketing goals. Take this very post I am writing right now for instance. I am writing it today, and I am going to post a link to it to my Twitter account when I finish. From my 22,000+ followers a few hundred will click on the link, read it and either decide to share it or move on with their lives. I will do the same on Facebook. The difference is that while I will not post it again on Facebook, I will share this again on twitter in 4 or five days.

Aren’t repeat posts a bad practice?

I argue no, not when you understand the nature of twitter probability. That means the probability that more than a fraction of my followers on Twitter saw any single post is extremely low. The truth is that many more of my followers would find it interesting than actually saw my tweet the first time around. In fact the analytics to my site show it perfectly, as you can see in the following graph the traffic to a specific post spikes each time it is shared.

Now the risk is that you do it too frequently and your followers feel like your stream is full of these repeat posts. So you need to space them out in days not hours. (I use SpokeSocial.com) to schedule my recurring post sharing, it allows me to schedule by the hour, day, week, month, or year all at one time. This can be a blog about your restaurant, a product page on your website, a bio page, or any other part of your online presence that you think more eyes should see in a given time span.

Post to Post vs Platform to Platform

So you can see that while a single Facebook post may outperform a single Twitter post, that is not a fair assessment of Twitter. As clearly a post on twitter has a shorter shelf life than Facebook and it would be foolish in my opinion to ignore one over the other. Platform to Platform I suspect Facebook to easily out ‘sell’ Twitter but that is natural as it is much larger, in any event as we noted earlier it would be foolish to make a decision to only use Facebook as I have heard some suggest.

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