Facebook Likes versus Tweets, what’s better for marketing?

With social media marketing becoming more and more of an essential activity for today’s businesses, marketers want to know – Twitter or Facebook?

According to a study by the event planning/registration site EventBrite,  Facebook seems to generate a higher return on investment ($1.30 in ticket sales per Like) compared to Twitter ($0.80 in ticket sales per tweet).  But is that the end of the discussion? Not really. Eventbrite was focusing the study on their business model. Every business is going to have slightly different goals and a different type of customer. For some clients, LinkedIn might be better than both Twitter AND Facebook; for others, a check-in social network like Foursquare might be better to help get customers through the door (restaurants, shops, etc).   Every business is going to have slightly different success rates based on the combination of the type of network that is used, type of customer and how the tool is used.

Its important to remember that its not the number of likes or tweets that matter, its all in how you make use of the tool and network.

For Massachusetts Web Designs, we use both Facebook and Twitter as part of our marketing strategy but they are used slightly differently to achieve the same goal. We use Twitter to post news and topics that we find industry relevant as well as the latest blog post.  This approach of finding and aggregating content has helped us gain new followers and new readers to the blog (as the content we tweet about is related to the blog posts). The idea is to create a loop between your social media networks and web presence to always keep your clients and followers connected.  Because the blog is a part of our site, our Twitter followers will click over to read the blog on our website, which then creates the opportunity for further exposure to our services which can then lead to referrals and new clients.

As for Facebook,  we use it more as a marketing tool and as a way to talk directly to our clients.  With Facebook, we are able to provide a lot more detail about our services thanks to the tools that Facebook provides, such as pages and groups.  It should be noted that the recent updates to Facebook allow business owners and marketers to do so much more. One of the more notable changes is the ability to use i-frames within pages.  The use of i-frames allows you to recreate your website or even an e-commerce interface right from a Facebook business page, something that no other major social network can provide right now.

So what’s best for your business?   Let us analyze your business, clients, and social footprint to come up with a winning social media strategy that works for you.    Contact us for a free social media consultation.