Today’s guest is written by Howie Goldfarb
Twitter or Facebook? Most consumer brands use both now. But what is the difference if you are crafting your strategy related to increasing sales?
Twitter is selling and Facebook is marketing.
Twitter is selling
Selling is finding someone and persuading them to buy your product. On Twitter, I can search, contact, ask questions, overcome objections and close the sale.
I have a mobile gourmet food client in Los Angeles. When she is in a town, I can search for people who say they are there and let these strangers know the most delicious ice cream sandwiches in the world are available nearby. I can send direct messages to our Twitter followers and I can call our brand ambassadors out by name without them having to post or engage us first. I can’t do any of this with a Facebook Fan Page. Twitter is a sales-friendly platform.
Facebook is marketing
Facebook Brand Pages are one of the biggest marketing deceptions in history. You can have millions of fans but you can’t reach most of them. You can’t call people out. You can’t message them. You must wait for them to come to you. It’s much like a big billboard on the freeway; except imagine the billboard goes blank for 45 of 50 cars that drive by. Your challenge is to get them to come by. And you can only talk to them if they come to your page. It’s a lot like sitting in your store and hoping customers will walk in.
But Facebook has a dirty little secret: They want this failure. They never intended Pages to be a success for businesses. Brand Pages must fail! If they didn’t, they would be out of business. They wouldn’t be worth the dumb money being touted.
Why? Because of Facebook Ads!
Ads are their revenue driver. If I could reach all my fans easily why would I buy ads? As long as Brand Pages have less than one percent engagement rates, and as long as there are more than 700 million accounts, brands are going to buy ads. Facebook has no desire to change this. And thus Brand Pages for 99.9 percent of business will never be allowed to drive sales on Facebook (0.1 percent get lucky!). And isn’t advertising part of marketing?
How many of you go to Facebook because it has the brands you love? None of you. And thus brands have to buy ads. And if you want to reach people there, you need to buy ads.
If you disagree try telling me on Facebook and try telling me on Twitter.
Howie Goldfarb is president and CEO of Sky Pulse Media, an agency focused on helping clients achieve outsized results in measurable bottom-line-impacting ways. He had a 14-year career in direct B2B sales before deciding to lighten up his dreary work life and move into advertising.