Explore how Facebook, the 900-pound gorilla, beats Twitter for your online business marketing!

With social media marketing gaining a lot of hype recently, numerous business owners are trying to compose a strategy for marketing their business and driving traffic to their websites via social networks. The two main social networks with highest interest level of business owners are Facebook and Twitter. Both these networks offer users a variety of ways to build their online business image and become socially popular among their partners, competitors and most of all customers!

Based on my own experience and observation, I found Facebook to be much better than Twitter in terms of business marketing. Here are the top most reasons that compelled me to formulate such a decision:

Larger in size…

While Twitter is still gaining media recognition, Facebook is one step ahead with a larger number of user community. According to the statistics, Facebook currently holds around 400 million active users when compared to only 18 million Twitter users recorded in 2009 which is expected to rise up to 26 million during 2010, still lagging behind Facebook in terms of size.

Better statistical tools

Since the launch of Facebook’s Insights tool for measurement, the level of Facebook analytics has improved. Here are some features of this tool:

• Lets you view the total amount of traffic to Pages, applications and other websites.
• Overview of fans and active fans on your pages.
• Domain tracking service for people to view the new social plugins.
• Identify referral traffic to an app from ads.
• Provides graphs for people to analyze their traffic trends.
• Provides language and location statistics.

Twitter analyzer and Twitter Counter tools are also great, but not as descriptive as the new Facebook analytics tool.

Viral marketing without any effort

Every action you make on Facebook automatically converts into a viral entity without you having to spend your time or effort on it. Your actions may appear as news feeds in your friend’s profiles which will attract others to click on them and this in return will maximize your chances of being successful and popular. Twitter also has viral capabilities in the form of re-tweeting, but not as easy as offered by Facebook.

Excellent advertising medium

Facebook blows away Twitter in terms of advertising. Its true that the main essence of any social media network is to build relationships with customers, but it wont hurt if that relationship converts into sales and money, does it? Facebook ads are not less than a blessing for internet marketing firm or business owner looking to promote a specific product or service.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook allows publishing rich media

With Twitter, you are unable to share rich media like videos and photos. You can publish such media someplace else and link it with your Twitter profile, but that doest come equal to having media alongside your business Logo like in Facebook. With Facebook you are able to post videos, photos, audio, music, and whatever interactive content you like to make your profile interesting and exciting.

Connects easily with your blog or website

Using fan pages and applications, you can integrate your blog posts and website URL with your Facebook profile. This way, users can directly access and comment on your blog posts or website news through the Facebook account. When compared to Twitter, Facebook offers a much smoother and easier way to connect their off-Facebook content with their on-Facebook content.

Facebook fills the owner-customer communication gap

Twitter may be praised for being a good platform to execute conversation with a single fan or user, but it becomes complicated to make other fans access that conversation. Facebook has an edge over Twitter in this matter and allows business owners to engage in open discussions with their fans and share those discussed comments easily among the others.

Manipulates content the way you want

Facebook privacy policies allows you to gain better control over which content you want to share with others and which not. It allows you to set and implement your own rules, and eliminating content that may be useless and irrelevant to your fans and friends. Twitter on the other hand doesn’t offer any such tools for content control and once you have been re-tweeted, there’s no stopping it! Scary isn’t it?

For me it’s Facebook!

But who do “YOU” think wins the Facebook vs. Twitter challenge?

Related posts:

1. 10 Tips To Capture Traffic From Facebook
2. How To Effectively Use Twitter?
3. 10 Tips to Make Your FaceBook Fan Page More Effective!
4. Your LinkedIn Profile – Important Things To Do And To Avoid
5. 20 Tips To Become An Expert Twitter User