Using Twitter and Facebook for Branding
May 7, 2009 by Ellen Ewart
Filed under Marketing
A recent article written by Allen Adamson for Forbes.com illustrates the differences between Facebook and Twitter in managing your brand.
While he doesn’t prophesies about which will exceed the other in popularity, he does believe that, “Twitter and Facebook can both play a role in a branding strategy. Having said this, I also think that just as users think about Twitter and Facebook differently, so too should companies as they go about their branding efforts.”
The key to both tools, he explains, is that they enable companies to listen to their audiences, the importance of which we’ve talked about on Brand Curve.He takes this a step further by talking about the quality of what you listen to. To establish a brand promise that can genuinely meet consumer needs and expectations, the quality of the insights you listen to need to be very high.
Monitoring opinions is very important, and the fact is, that with the tools are their disposal, customers are going to spread word quickly whether you’re apart of it or not. Monitoring these conversations, as Adamson says, can help you fix a sticky situation before it gets too out of hand, and it can also enhance the experiences making them more relevant and valuable.
When it comes to differentiating the two tools, Adamson calls Twitter an “early warning system” – letting “marketers know instantly what’s going on as it happens,” he says, and giving them the “opportunity for rapid response.” He also attributes to Twitter the power to “get people to self assemble and become impromptu, impassioned marketing machines.”
Facebook on the other hand is about a deeper dive into details. He calls it a “forum in which to engage consumers in a more significant way, to share more and to get them to share more of themselves in the process.” This is an obvious difference given the capabilities of Facebook’s platform to be more engaging and deeper in it’s contact points.
“Facebook, the Petrie dish for word-of-mouth that it is,” he writes, “is a fantastically efficient tool for creating brand advocacy.”
So, as Jeremy Bullmore in this year’s Brandz commentary wrote, it’s now all about empowering your consumers with the tools they need to create your brand .
