A craftsman might have over a dozen screwdrivers. A tinkerer like myself needs a couple of slots and a couple of Philips/plus and we’re good-to-go for most anything we’d encounter around the home.
As our use of social-networking tools matures, we might find ourselves wanting to invest in more refined devices to deal with specific issues, messages, and/or constituents.
Allyson Kapin at FrogLoop.com (Care2‘s nonprofit marketing blog) recently offered her take on this particular battle. Though not as bloody as the Facebook vs. Google melee we discussed last week, this particular battle might actually have practical and meaningful application to how charities and nonprofits get the word out.
Building on surveys by other nonprofit-media watchers as well as her own experiences, Allyson believes the trust factor among Facebook Friends means that though click-throughs are fewer, they are more rewarding than on Twitter.
She compiled this useful compendium of stats:
- Users spend, on average, 12 minutes and 37 seconds per month on Twitter, according to Forbes. But on Facebook, users spend 700 billion minutes monthly, which is about 36 minutes per day every month.
- 50% of Facebook’s active users log on to Facebook in any given day. Note that active users are defined as someone who’s logged in at least once in the previous 30 days.
- Less than 25% of users generate 90% of the world’s tweets.
- 47% of those who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the service.
All of which might suggest an emphasis on Facebook is the way to go. But what her post doesn’t discuss is how the two can feed on each other. Rather than see the two social media as locked in a competition, why not see them as different tools in the box that can fit different parts of the larger project?
When planning a fundraising event, for example, create a Facebook ‘Event’ page, with periodic and systematic tweets that get your Followers to click through to that event, to websites of related topics or participating organizations, etc.
The irony of this conversation is not lost on Ms.Kapin’s analysis, though: as of publishing this post, 148 people had tweeted her story, ‘only’ 48 shared it on Facebook.
Has your organization considered ways to utilize these two different tools? Allyson’s article might be a good place to start the discussion.