A few days back, I wrote a simple but business data crucial comparison between Twitter vs Facebook vs Google vs StumbleUpon. For some, it was revealing. For others, it was revelational. And yet, for most, it was Swahili. So, now, in technicolor, here are the 5 slides that explain the two blog posts above. Enjoy and make sure you let your TV Dinner stand before eating!
I love echos. There's a certain feeding 5,000 men with one loaf of bread kinna quality to them. Say it once and your words just get rippled across space and time -- literally.
I remember one echo. After a greuling 15 hour drive, a life threatening flash flood danger narrows wading, and a 6 hour Matterhornian climb to the top, I collapsed next to several small memorial monuments. One was about a boy who had fallen to his death. Another was about a woman who would forever be missed. One even had fresh flowers around it. I had finally reached the top of Angel's Landing in Zion UTAH.
If you crawled on your belly to peek over the cold hearted edge and you squinted, you could see eagles flying beneath you.
I sang a song. It was Running to Stand Still. And it echoed.
And echoed.
And echoed.
And echoe
And ech
And e
A...
Well, it wasn't always like that in traditional media. You had to run the same ad spot or display ad every 10 minutes or every issue for anyone to hear you. You had to generate your own echoes. Then, came remote controls. They ruined advertising. You no longer had to sit there and watch a commercial about fungal infections. This was a big deal in marketing ROI. It's that echo that costs so much to generate.
Social media not only lets the little guy have access to an audience, it gives the little guy the same access to that cavernous and precipiceous far above the treeline topography where everything you say can go and go.
Facebook vs Twitter vs Google vs StumbleUpon Comparison
So we've compared social media to conventional media. Now lets compare the various media within social media. There's Facebook, Twitter, Google (not social), and Stumbleupon. Each has their unique superpower. If you put them together, by the power of Greyskull, you've got Voltron.
It's true.
To consumate any deal, make any sale, you need two things.
If you're the foremost expert on shammies but I can't stand you, I'm not going to buy from you. Conversely, if you're my brother but you can't hold down a job, I'm not going to invest in your new startup. You need both.
Facebook Facebook gives you rapport.
If you post a message on your wall, have you ever noticed that when you first login to Facebook, you get dropped onto the "Home" page? You do realize there are two main pages. If you post a message on your wall, it'll get posted into a stream of status updates on every single one of your "friend's" home pages.
The average user has 130 friends. So each of your messages gets just under 130 impressions. Why less than that? Well, that "home" page is only so long. If 14 of your friends post a message, before you get a chance to logon and read that stream, The earliest post gets pushed down to the next page. And when's the last time you actually clicked back a page in Facebook?
A message in facebook has about a 24 hour shelf-life. But since you have a lot of rapport, your CTR or click through rate will be fairly high if your post is relevant to your friends' interests. I've seen as high at 23% CTR!
EDITED: I just got an email from a client saying that everyone else he's talked to makes Facebook ads a mission crittical component of their strategy. I don't recommend spending a penny on Facebook ads. ZERO. If you're interested in why, message me privately at http://facebook.com/bob.wan.kim
Twitter Twitter gives you credibility. In twitter, the average user has about 250 followers. I know. You've heard different figures. They are wrong. I am right. Here's why:
Only 19% of the users in Twitter still use Twitter. So, if you skim off that 89% group who only have 10 followers, your average jumps massively. But the trouble is, while every message is indeed blasted onto each of your Twitter followers' home page just like facebook, the remaining tweeple are far more active than your Facebook friends. A twitter stream's shelf-life is only about 1 hour.
So while 70% of your 130 Facebook friends are still using Facebook and a post has a whole 24 hours before it gets lost, in Twitter, only 19% of your 250 followers are still using Twitter and you've only got one hour before your tweet disappears into a plushly shag carpeted abyss (keeping the echo annology alive). Oh, and don't forget about the timing of your tweets. 300% more of your followers are online on Twitter after lunch than during. So if you tweet at noon, to your 250 followers, of the 48 people who still use Twitter, only about 1% of them will even see your tweet.
Yes. That's plush, high pile carpet on the wall and ceiling.
Finally, if you have a large follower count, people visiting your Twitter profile http://twitter.com/journik will think you're some kinna celebrity. So Twitter gives you credibility. But unlike Facebook, people find you on Twitter based on #FF and keyword searches. They don't know you from Adam.
NEXT: Let's add in Google and StumbleUpon. To be alerted when Google and Stumbleupon are added into the equation, just friend me at http://facebook.com/bob.wan.kim
PS... this is NOT saying that Twitter is useless. Twitter is much more powerful than Facebook in 3 respects. The readers who've become a marketing client of http://sparkah.com know exactly what those 3 things are...
PPS. an hour and a half after I sang that song on Angel's landing, some dude from Laguna Beach walked up to me panting. He said, "Don't sing. You're noise polluting!"
staff notes: metrics rapport vs credibility actual readership visibility attrition time peak visibility hours
Before you begin to write up a budget for your boss or client to approve, you've got to create a landscape where the final numbers you present will create a sigh of relief instead of a ghasp of panic. Right?
If you try and educate me about the value of VVS, flawless, white 1 ct diamonds after you've shocked me with a $23,000 price tag, you've already lost the sale (not that that is too expensive for you, ladies, I mean, ummm... the right woman). You've gotta create appreciation for the hand stitched Corinthian leather dating back to biblical times, the hand machined throaty V-12 that delivers to your passenger seat the exact same vibrational resonance as an Oral-B battery operated vibrating head toothbrush (?), and the $2000 a pop P-Zero soft rubber tires you'll need to replace at the end of summer. Then, when you tell me it only costs $128,000, I'll think it's a steal.
So here's your ground work:
1. People are spending much more time entertaining each other than via 1 way media. Newspapers, Magazines, Billboards, and even TV is losing attention. Instead, people, you, are buried nose deep in your iPhone or Android's Facebook, Youtube, or Twitter.
Facebook says that over 50% of their users login every day. If they spend 23 minutes per login checking friends photos and returning messages, thats the length of a primetime sitcom.
Facebook has 400 million active users. The #1 rated primetime sitcom Friends had 52 million viewers.
If you could get an ad for just 30 seconds on Friends or on Facebook, which would you do?
If you could get an ad for just 30 seconds on Friends or on Facebook, which would you do?
2. Continued: Friend me on facebook for the next point to use in justifying a social media budgethttp://www.facebook.com/bob.wan.kim ... I'll post it shortly.Â
If you want help designing and building your social media marketing, I'm more than happy to chip in or just answer questions:
I remember a conference where a Harvard Business School professor spoke. He asked, "If you're going to sell a bible, who'd you rather sell it to? Someone with or without one?"
Most of us in the audience said, "without."
"How would you sell a bible to a non-christian?!" he glared back at us.
"If you're going to sell a bible, who'd you rather sell it to? Someone with or without one?"
"I'd have a much better chance of selling a bible to the fanatic who already has ten of em!"
He was right. There are two kinds of Twitter uers who follow you.
1) Christians and ... oh, wait... People who RT
and
2) People who don't.
In otherwords, there's really no sense asking people who never RT to Retweet a post for you. Is there?
So what I do is make a list of all the people who DO retweet. Then I use an @message asking them to RT me again. AFTER I've RT'd them or Follow Friday recommended them. NEXT: Top 10 Twitter Facebook and Google Viral Marketing Secrets
I have a greater RT frequency than @aplusk. It's true. If you have any questions, i'm at http://www.facebook.com/bob.wan.kim ... how can I help you?
After almost half a decade of Twitter and Facebook being around, nobody seems to clearly understand the pros and cons of either for use in marketing. In fact, I started Googling for a competitive matrix that compared all the key web marketing factors applied between Facebook and Twitter. I Fail.
So I just built one myself. Below is a table that compares these two social media marketing powerhouses across 15 key web marketing criteria. The terms used are industry terms so if you're not sure what each one means, I've also included a video discussion of this matrix below.
In any case, while you can measure a googleplex worth of criteria, in the end, effective marketing simply comes down to how many hours did you have to spend to create a dollar? Will Twitter make me that same dollar faster than Facebook? Twitter vs Facebook CTR and social media marketing matrix:
Twitter
Facebook
Visibility
1 hour
12 hours
SEO
no. nofollow
no. nofollow and hidden links
CTR within 3 min
0.2% (1000 followers = 2 clicks)
0.05%
CTR within 1 hour
0.3%
1.2%
CTR within 12 hours
0.35%
5.3%
Conversion Rate
nil, null, ziltch
0.05% (2000 friends = 1 purchase)
Comment Visibility
only your followers
everyone in comment stream
Follower aquisition
almost impossible
easy but limited
Follower acquisition limits
1000 follows / day
20 / few hours
Loyalty
low
high
Spam Noise
medium
low
Privacy
none
medium
Mobility
high
medium-high
Learning curve
high
low
Content Richness
text only
text, thumbnail, video
So how do Twitter clicks look compared Facebook clicks over time? With Twitter, You're going to see a jump in the beginning and a rapid tapering off. After about an hour, your Tweet gets buried. Facebook however doesn't really have a CTR spurt. It stays constant over about a 12 hour period before your Facebook status post gets buried.
TWITTER:
FACEBOOK:
Now that you're equipped with data that helps you project your marketing and advertising ROI, you'll find that creating the above conversion rates and CTRs are not as easy as it seems. Especially since Facebook has a 5,000 friend limit, you'll have to start using Facebook pages.
Then you'll run into another can of worms. So if you'd like professional and experienced help marketing your company, call me at 310 598 1606 or just bring any questions you may have to http://www.facebook.com/bob.wan.kim
When Google first bought the contextual advertising system that later became Adwords, it made them a billion dollars fast. And it was worth it. Google's credibility was an eternity further ahead than Yahoo's and All the ads were matched to your search.
But in reality, where they made most of their money is that the typical user spent about 2 years not ever noticing the difference between sponsored paid ads vs the organic ads that rose to the top above-the-fold ranks. It's true. Advertisers were getting amazing CTRs simply because Google users thought the top ads were actually the most popular.
All that is over.
When's the last time you clicked on a Google Adwords ad?
But I bet you've "liked" a Facebook page plugin recently. This is because most people still don't realize that "liking" Facebook Pages auto subscribes you to the posts on that page wall. It's just like opting in with your email only it comes into your friends and family Facebook stream.
The above page is designed to bring up healthy and sustainable topics so that friends can come together, chat, discuss, and save the earth - if you will.
Technical Specs: Google Adwords vs Facebook Pages As a business owner, the precision with which you can target your demographic is stunning. Google basically only lets you target people by keyword and geography. So if you sell toys on your ecommerce website and you advertise under the words, "dolls," in adwords, you don't know if a mom just cost you $5 by clicking through to your site or whether a left wing militant green peace activist cost you that same $5 to criticize you about how much plastics go into your toys. Seriously.
VS
Personally, even if you've got an unlimited budget, unless there's a specific reason you insist on doing search based marketing, I recommend putting all your ad dollars into facebook. You'll create long term relationships and for about 80% less cost. Contact me to get an experienced hand to help you do your web marketing at http://twitter.com/journik and 310 598 1606
I just found Guy Kawasaki's Alltop on the same topic. But since the link he posted for a free ebook download seems like an email harvesting scam, I'll just share with you my Facebook marketing secrets.
80% of my traffic comes from Facebook friends. 10% comes from Twitter. The rest come from Google.
Based on the above stats, you can tell that marketing with facebook is effective. But the sound of the other shoe dropping is that i have 4,200 Facebook friends, 22,000 Twitter followers, and rank page one in google for the relevant search terms. So when you look at the CTR vs reach, Facebook comes across as the clear winner - by far.
My estimate is that each of my Facebook friends are worth about 55 Twitter followers. So the only advantage to Twitter is that you can reach people you can't via Facebook.
Having said all this, lets get down to the mechanics of how to reach people via Facebook:
1. Use pages. Personal Facebook accounts have a 5,000 person cap. Pages have no "liker" cap. You can create an unlimited number of pages.
2. Select a "company" page. Community pages can get "adopted" or ghestapo commandeered by Facebook. Being a company page vs community page offers zero added resistance
3. Name your page carefully. If you name your page, "Tim Bur's Lumber," nobody is going to "like" it. If you name your page, "Hard Wood," lots of people will like it. But how many of them are your target market? If you name your page, "sustainable lumber," target demographic people who happen-chance by may yawn and click "like." But prolly not. If you name your page, "I just staple gunned my thumb to the rafters," the emotional imagery will earn you 2000%-5000% more "likes." And the above target demographic will be included as a subset. You cannot change a page name after you've created it so craft a name that is emotional and targets your demographic. Advertising your lumber on a page named "lesbians for fiberglass homes," (yep, it exists) will just get your unliked - undoing all your hard work.
Seriously. Think about all the reach this person has. But if they talk about anything NOT sleep related, they'll get "unliked" (unsubscribed) faster than a narcoleptic can fall asleep.
My estimate is that each of my Facebook friends are worth about 55 Twitter followers
4. When you make an admin post, make sure it's not ad-like. People hate being sold to. Educate about the merits of your product. Don't sell. Educate.
5. Promote your page everywhere. Get a Facebook Like Pluggin at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like You'll need to use another page for creating a like button for a Facebook Page. I will post that url as soon as I find it. Sorry.
Bonus: Offer prizes or give aways to anyone who "likes" your page You're basically giving away something cheap to build your opt-in page subscriber base
Why go to all this trouble? If I click "Like" on one of your Facebook pages, every comment you make will show up in my Facebook account home wall. If I then click "like" on a recent post of yours, all my friends will see what you posted too. Viral at it's best.
Follow me at http://twitter.com/journik for more ongoing tips. And if you have a corporation that sells nationwide or internationally, ask me about executing your corporate social media marketing via blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I guarantee it'll be much more effective than any other advertising you're doing now. Or call 310 598 1606 - Bob Wan Kim.
You remember when you first joined a social media networking site like Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter? The first time was a breeze. You imported your email address contacts and immediately had a chunk of followers, friends, and connections.
While you can use the above strategy for long term network building, you'd be amazed how powerful the following single tip / trick is at raking in a huge influx of friends, followers, and connections in one fell swoop. Nice part is that you can do this periodically. I do it every 3 months.
How to Export Gmail Inbox Messages as CSV You Can't. There's even an export gmail message filter lab feature. But it only exports the filters - NOT the messages that are filtered. So what you do instead is to download all your gmail to a POP/IMAP desktop client like Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2010. Nice part is that if you google: Microsoft Office Outlook Trial, you can get it for free for 60 days.
Once you've configured your Outlook, it'll take a day or two to get a whole bunch of exportable email messages:
How to Extract Email Addresses from Gmail Inbox Messages and Import them Into Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Sparkah.com
1.
2. Export as CSV but Delete Subject and Body to Minimize File Size
3. Import in Gmail Contact
4. Finally, Import Your New Massive Email Address Contacts Database into Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin
You ever feel like unless you're already a bigshot, nobody will follow you back on Twitter? Well, this video will make you a micro-bigshot. You'll atleast be big enough to have 70% of the people you contact follow you back... here's how to get twitter tweeple to follow back fast: Followers:
Drop me a hello over twitter. Let's team up and work together. I'd love to hear about what you do. http://twitter.com/journik
How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With 
Comments [1]