If you asked anyone what the top two social networking sites are, a lot of them would probably say Facebook and Twitter. Both have become important tools in staying connected to friends, family, the news, celebrities, companies, bands/musicians, public figures and various brands.
Of course, it all depends on how you use a social network, so making an argument for which social networking site is the best entirely depends on your own experience of opinion.
Still, we can take a look at how Facebook and Twitter stack up against each other to help you choose which one you might want to spend more time using.
Facebook’s Brand vs. Twitter’s Brand
In a lot of ways, Facebook and Twitter are very similar. Both let you connect to almost anyone and anything, and both let you share or view different types of content, from photos and video to text updates and links to other sites.
But let’s take a step back and look at how each social networking site describes itself. Here are the slogans each social network has put on its homepage:
Facebook:Connect and share with the people in your life.
In that short sentence, we can tell that Facebook primarily wants you to connect with people you actually know or have met in real life, like friends, family members and coworkers. It’s more of a social network for your real life rather than one you use to connect personally with total strangers.
Facebook business pages have allowed organizations or individuals to connect with fans on a larger scale, and the new “follow” feature on public personal profiles are also useful for fans of a particular individual, but Facebook has still always been known for emphasizing closer relationships in user networks.
That’s why you’ve always been required to approve all friend requests before they can be officially connected to you through Facebook.
Twitter:Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.
While Facebook’s brand has everything to do with closer, “real life” relationships, Twitter’s brand has more to do with instant, real-time updates from anyone and everything you’re interested in. Twitter profiles are made public by default when you set one up, so networks are meant to be completely open across all of Twitter.
And because Twitter is basically just like one big, open worldwide chatroom, it’s become an invaluable resource for news and live breaking events. Twitter absolutely trumps Facebook over the timing of shared information as events unfold.
Facebook’s News Feed vs. Twitter’s Stream
Both social networks give you a glimpse of all the stuff that’s be shared by your friends/followers, right on the homepage (either Facebook.com or Twitter.com when you’re signed in). Each feed is quite different.
Facebook News Feed: While the Facebook news feed automatically refreshes itself without needing to click on anything, it also shows a selection of posts like photos, videos and the most “visually appealing” content being posted by the friends you interact with the most and the pages you like the best. It doesn’t show everything, but it does try to learn what you like the best, and then shows you the posts that are most relevant to your interests and overall Facebook activity.
Twitter Stream: With Twitter, everyone’s updates are posted as a 140-character text post so you can see all of them as they happen. If you follow a lot of people your Twitter stream can move pretty fast. It has a bit of a cleaner look to Twitter because you only see text, but if you click to expand any tweet with a link attached, you may see a video, a photo or an article summary embedded with the use of Twitter Cards.
Facebook Timeline Profile vs. Twitter Profile
As a user, you get to build your profile on Facebook or Twitter to help you stand out or tell your friends/followers more about you.
Facebook Timeline Profile: Facebook has a pretty extensive list of options you can use to tell people more about yourself, including work and education, where you’re living, who you’re related to on Facebook, relationship status, religious views, contact info, favorite quotes and event milestone events from the past. With the new Timeline setup, your profile is supposed to represent a “virtual scrapbook” of your life.
Twitter Profile: If you want to say a lot about yourself with your Twitter profile, you’re going to have to do it through your tweets, because Twitter doesn’t have nearly as much of a “virtual scrapbook” feel as Facebook does. On Twitter, you get a profile picture, a username, a place to put your full name, a bio section, a location section, a website section, a little area to the side for your media shares, and a customizable header and background. Twitter likes to keep it simple.
Facebook Interaction vs. Twitter Interaction
There’s not much to say here, because everyone uses each social networking site differently – whether it’s for photo sharing on Facebook, silly quote sharing on Twitter, Facebook stalking old friends or nagging celebrities through Twitter. Neither social network is better than the other, but both are quite different when you really break it down.