Twitter vs. Facebook: Who Has Better Self-serve Ads for SMBs?

Guest post contributed by Marissa, on behalf of Brandwatch.com – Brandwatch ia a social media monitoring site that allows brands and agencies to use their social media monitoring software and services to capture and analyse social media conversations.

Twitter or Facebook?

As the owner of a small or medium-sized business, it is your job to allocate your advertising budget as efficiently as possible to boost your business’s profitability. With many traditional advertising outlets increasing their rates month after month, many businesses have turned to social media advertising to diversify their efforts. Facebook has offered business advertising options for some time, while Twitter added them more recently. Twitter and Facebook advertising options both offer unique positives and negatives; depending on your specific goals, either or both could be beneficial in different situations.

Twitter offers two different primary advertising choices for business owners: sponsored accounts and sponsored tweets. The two options fulfill quite different purposes. Sponsored accounts are designed to help build your brand and your customer’s awareness of it on Twitter. Sponsored Tweets, on the other hand, will help ensure that potential customers see specific Tweets; ideally, they will then click through to your website and actually make a purchase. The main difference is that one will help you get more followers for your Twitter page, which can pay off in the long run; the other pushes traffic straight to your website for a short-term sales boost.

Know Your Target

Of course, Twitter advertising is not necessarily ideal for all business. However, depending on your demographic your target market might follow Tweets more than they concentrate on Facebook ads. As a general rule, people who are self-employed or that are between the ages of 18 and 35 tend to be Twitter users. A benefit that Facebook has over Twitter, though, is that its network includes more than 750 million users, many of whom are frequently active. Additionally, Facebook offers very targeted advertising. For example, if you own a pet store in Phoenix, Arizona and are currently running a sale on dog supplies, Facebook allows you to target your ads to only individuals who live in the Phoenix area and who have expressed an interest in dogs in the past. The benefit of this type of narrowly targeted advertising is that it helps lower your advertising costs by not showing your ads to people who would necessarily be uninterested in your product, which is a huge waste of your advertising dollars.

If your business caters to people worldwide, Facebook can still be an effective advertising platform. In fact, the decreased competition for customers outside of the United States means that you may be able to improve your return on ads targeted to overseas customers. Of course, Twitter also offers international exposure, but its far smaller user base limits this advertising’s effectiveness somewhat. About 600 million users are regularly active on Facebook, compared to about 56 million users on Twitter.

Best Of Both Worlds

It is understandable that you would want to determine which advertising option works better for your business; however, in many cases your best option is simply to incorporate a blend of both networks on a limited basis. As with any type of advertising, you should regularly test your ad copy, photos, targeting and other options. As you determine which setups provide the best return, you can expand your ad spend in those categories.