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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Repeat Posts Traffic Graph

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.

What are your thoughts? If you want to get posts like this from me in the future, you can subscribe HERE.

 


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20 responses to “Twitter: It’s Temporary Nature and Your Marketing”

  1. Todd Wright Avatar
    Todd Wright

    Thanks Spiro. Excellent and informative! 

    1. Spiro Pappadopoulos Avatar

      Thanks Todd!

      Spiro Pappadopoulos
      Owner Evenfall Restaurant
      My profiles: [image: Facebook]
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      Blog RSS] [image:
      Twitter]
      [image: Twitter] Latest tweet: How much do
      we love you? a lot. RT @_alval: Dinner & hockey at @Evenfall125 tonight, be
      there or you’re square.
      Follow @evenfall125

      Reply

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      16:55 Jun-13
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  2. Tim Harrap Avatar
    Tim Harrap

    To be deterministic and expect/ demand a reward(monetary?) on social media misses the point. If you start from the premise of sharing, giving a gift, then the rewards will come in unexpected and hopefully fulfilling ways. What is going on here is a new economy and to expect conventional ROI mindsets to justify this new experience might just be missing the point.

    1. Spiro Pappadopoulos Avatar

      While I agree that you start with sharing, I disagree that to be concerned
      with return is wrong. Any business is by its very nature concerned with
      return. Returns can not come ‘hopefully’ and they should be expected
      otherwise why are you doing all this work?

      Spiro Pappadopoulos
      Owner Evenfall Restaurant
      My profiles: [image: Facebook]
      [image:
      Blog RSS] [image:
      Twitter]
      [image: Twitter] Latest tweet: How much do
      we love you? a lot. RT @_alval: Dinner & hockey at @Evenfall125 tonight, be
      there or you’re square.
      Follow @evenfall125

      Reply

      Retweet
      16:55 Jun-13
      Get this email app!

      Signature powered by

      WiseStamp

  3. Well Done Avatar

    First post I have read from you. Found it informative and useful. Makes me reconsider the way I have my posts spaced out. Thanks!

  4. Bbaskets06 (Laura Barber) Avatar
    Bbaskets06 (Laura Barber)

    This was an informative post.  Thanks! I enjoyed reading and learning a bit more on marketing through Facebook and Twitter and how they both function as a marketing tool.

  5. Marci Avatar
    Marci

    I think you’ve missed a few points:
    Propagation on twitter.  People tend to retweet more than they share facebook posts.  Therefore you are more likely to expand your audience beyond the regulars through twitter than facebook.  Hopefully these people will be interested in subscribe to your twitter (and be encouraged to like/join/friend your facebook). 

    Immediacy of twitter:  Twitter is wonderful for short-time sales and specials announcements.  Because it goes away, people aren’t annoyed when you post a twitter sale that expires in 2 hours. On facebook, because of its very persistence, offers would have to be longer to reach your target. Consider something like United Airlines which offers special twitter fares with a limited-time element.

    Portability: Relating back to sales and specials. If you’re a company with a physical presence you can send tweets that users can receive on their phones and show to your clerks, thus providing a quick sale. I have been out and about and received a Border’s tweet with a 20% off coupon and immediately stopped at my nearest Borders and used the coupon without having to go home and print anything off.  With smartphones, you have a similar ability with email, but the facebook interface is too clunky to make this a desirable use model.

  6. Matthew Decuir Avatar

    I definitely agree with all of this, but I think one big factor that was left out is Facebook’s Edgerank. You can post on Facebook, but only a small percentage of your fans, usually less than 5 percent, will see the post. So to say that facebook automatically reaches more people is false.

  7.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    The temporary nature of twitter – and the probabilities you discuss – all make sense, but one could end up seeming spammy, especially when your readers access your content through lists.  Timing ones tweets to air when ones audience is tuned in can further refine the success of ones marketing.  Apps like Tweriod and Bufferapp (http://www.tweriod.com & http://www.bufferapp.com) are certainly worth considering.

    1. Spiro Pappadopoulos Avatar

      I believe your concern should be more about the likely hood of content being seen at all, that is why I wrote this. Recently a bit.ly stuy of link life revealed this:

      According to research by Bit.ly (the
      link shortening service used by millions of users), after the initial post to Facebook the half life of a link was 70 minutes (the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak)

      [image: Rate of Clicks to a Link]
      A post to Twitter was shown to have a half life of only 5 minutes.

      This shows the difference between Twitter (which is more a stream of links) and Facebook which is a destination where link life is considerably greater. The number one take away from this was: Tweet your content more than once. Remember Twitter is a stream that flows past and doesn’t land in an inbox!
      from JeffBullas