Facebook is a great company with a product that has revolutionized how people find and stay in touch with their friends and family. The ability for users to add "friends", send them messages, post announcements, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves, in an intuitively easy user interface, has fueled its phenomenal growth, particulalry in the past five years. At the same time, brands using Facebook for advertising are currently challenged with low-yield and some are re-considering Facebook as a sustainable advertising medium. Facebook, for now at least, seems to have not found the "holy grail" answer yet for the advertisers.
Experimentations at Salorix has shown that Twitter has a few inherent advantages over Facebook as a potential advertising media. Without getting too technical, here are a few reasons why:
- People do not go to Facebook expecting to see ads. The interaction on a Facebook page feels more like a personal "portal" where people do not expect to be interrupted nor distracted.
- Given a Facebook posting is not limited by size, people either tend to express too little ("nice pic") or too much, which makes figuring out the context and intent difficult. Furthermore, without history and access to the social graph in a public manner, an advertiser is handicapped. Limited by 140 characters, people tend to express themselves much more clearly on Twitter, at least when we consider non-spammy statuses. This makes it easier for advertisers to contextually target their ads far better.
- Twitter is also a far more "open" system, which allows for easy data collection and analytics and direct targeting. This enables advertisers to experiment with different formats, messages and contents and figure out the combinations that work for their brands.
There are other features that twitter provides (real-time data through firehoses, direct measurability) that are more "advertiser friendly" than Facebook. Net-net, however, user's expectation about ads, advertisers ability to detect topical relevance and intent and open-ness of the system, gives Twitter an inherent advantages over Facebook.
Would or should Facebook go in the direction of Twitter to make it more advertiser friendly? And if so, what would brands like to see?