Editor’s Note: I’ve spoken with Dennis on many occasions about his view on using Facebook and Twitter for Business. Following is his very blunt advice. Agree? Disagree? Let me know!- Leigh
I get this question a lot. So let me put it bluntly. If you are not a celebrity or household brand, forget about twitter. Unless people care about what you just ate or who you were seen in public with, as is done in the tabloids, you’re not going to get enough followers for it to even be worth your time. My twitter account has 3,502 followers, while my Facebook account has only 2,082 fans. Facebook is the #7 referrer to my blog while Twitter is #20. So even though I have more followers on twitter, I’m getting 6 times the traffic from Facebook.
And if you consider that the Facebook fan page for Dennis Yu has only 496 fans, the contrast is more stark. Why?
Twitter is for existing brands and personalities that have massive recognition. What you can say in 140 characters can’t possibly have much depth, though you can retweet pithy sayings, post interesting articles, or even communicate casually with friends. But to generate more awareness, traffic, or sales for your business? Unlikely. The exception proves the rule– there’s that one donut shop that people cite as the example for small business success on twitter.
Facebook is where you can connect with real friends. You can interact with them and share in deep, meaningful ways (or at least as far as is possible online). I’d challenge you to tell me what share of twitter users are bots, what percentage of tweets are done by bots, and what percentage of tweets go unread. I’d wager that the ratio of spam pages on the internet approximates the spam ratio on twitter– although, I’d say that Facebook would be MUCH cleaner because of reinforcing mechanisms of the newsfeed filter and social graph.