Social Media Marketing is fast becoming a fine art. Consumers today use different platforms from the multitude of available ones and in order to effectively communicate with them, businesses have to be establish their presence on every single one of them.

Although Facebook is still number one as far as rating for social media performance is concerned (See Image below), but Twitter comes in at second place and is all set to take over from Facebook in the coming years.

 Image Source

Two of the most common objectives of Social Media Marketing are:

1. Customer Engagement, Feedback and Support
2. Expanding and Networking with potential leads

Twitter allows us to do both and in a very direct manner.

The use of Twitter handles allows the customer to directly “tweet“ to the company and provide feedback or ask for support. Every tweet using a company’s handle shows up in their notification as a “mention“. With the advent of smart phones and mobile apps, customers can tweet from anywhere, anytime and the company can respond back in real time. The customer does not have to go to the company page’s timeline, as for Facebook, and post there, which although is an easy enough process, but nevertheless tweeting is far less time consuming.

Hashtags

No one living this side of the twenty-first century can be unaware of what hashtags are. Hashtags have gone viral. Every event has to have a hashtag attached to it, be it a global mobile event like #MWC15 or a simple wedding, hashtags allow everyone to see what is being said about that particular topic.

                 Facebook, with it usual lumbering approach, jumped up into the hashtag wagon six years too late By that time, Twitter users were well-versed the use of them, and Facebook users were thought of new-comers in this world.

            Tweets, with their 140 letter character limit are easier to read AND write, as compared to long-winded Facebook posts, which can get annoying.

             The only advantage that Facebook has over Twitter is familiarity. Facebook was the first social media network to really catch fire and hence its users are loyal, are used to it and might be reluctant to jump onto a network that is slightly more complicated to understand and learn. But Twitter has the next-gen Millennials as its biggest users and is hence predicted to be the biggest social media network in the coming years.

 Here is an overall snapshot. May the best Platform Win!