Faceoff In Viral Marketing: Facebook vs Twitter

The 2 titans in viral  marketing are currently Facebook and Twitter even though Twitter only has a fraction of the number of users of Facebook. At the time of this writing, Twitter has around 3 million users, compared to 200 million for Facebook, but all the buzz is about Twitter.

Being a user of both online viral marketing services, I can certainly see why Twitter trounces Facebook in many ways, but will it be able to knockout the champion? Let’s start by taking a look at some advantages of Twitter over Facebook.

5 Twitter Advantages:

1. Easy to get followers

2. Easy to follow people, no permission required, and few rules and restrictions.

3. Very simple and quick, maximum 140 characters per ?tweet?

4. Allows aliases

5. Searchable, with full profile views

Now let’s take a look at some areas where Facebook has an advantage:

1. Fan page feature

2. Better support for multi-media, although this is improving in Twitter

3. Creates trust

4. Very viral

5. Event page feature

Overall, Facebook is a lot more complex than Twitter. And it’s much more cumbersome and restrictive to get friends on Facebook. Friends must approve you and if you are not a friend, you can’t see a person’s full profile.

Facebook also has some archaic restrictions on adding friends. There is a friend threshold, and if you go over the limit Facebook will disable your ability to add friends for an unspecified amount of time. And they also don’t publish the threshold so it’s a guessing game.

And if you violate their mysterious rules and restrictions too many times, Facebook will disable your account permanently and you will have to start all over with a new account and 0 friends. I know several people that have had this happen after growing their friend lists to a few thousand friends. And they weren’t even told what they did wrong. Ouch! I’m doing my best to avoid this.

I have personally violated the “mysterious adding friend threshold”. When I got slapped by Facebook for this I was not able to add any new friends for over a week. I significantly reduced the number of friends I was inviting each day and still got a nasty email threatening from them.

If you want to get started in viral marketing check out twitter for it’s ease of use, short messages, and lack of prohibitive rules and restrictions. The main thing, I’ve found that it’s a lot of fun and you can learn a lot from people posting interesting info!

And now I would like to invite you to claim your Free Access to “15 Ways To Grow Your Business Online”. Just click here to send me a blank email and you’ll start receiving valuable information that can help you get more traffic to your website or blog and make more money from your visitors.

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