Facebook Ads VS. Twitter Ads: A Friendly Face-off

Let’s be honest: deciding where to allocate your marketing budget is a daily struggle.

When it comes to social media, the decision is often split between Facebook and Twitter. So, how do you decide which makes more sense for your money?

In this blog, we’ll be analyzing three aspects of those platforms: reach/budget, targeting, and reporting.

Facebook Advertising

Reach/Budget

Although it’s amazing for large companies, if you’re a small business with a somewhat small budget, Facebook ads are also ideal for you.

Organic Facebook posts have an extremely low reach due to the platform’s ever-changing algorithm. So, running a Facebook ad is almost expected, but it’s worth it for growing your fan base, gaining engagement, clicks, or a larger reach than 30 people.

Targeting

On Facebook, targeting is limited to location, gender, age, demographic, interest, and behaviour. You can also exclude people from viewing your ads, which can be key depending on your campaign strategy.

One great targeting feature is Custom Audiences. This feature allows you to target audiences based on your existing connections. This means you can serve up ads to your current customers/fans rather than looking for new ones. This is done by uploading a list of customer data (e.g. purchaser email addresses), and Facebook will aim to reach them (and don’t worry, this information will be encrypted).

Another impressive feature Facebook offers (that Twitter does not), is the ability to save your audience and re-use it for other ads. This could save you and your business some valuable time if you are regularly targeting your ads to the same audience.

Reporting

Facebook reporting is quite intuitive: it’ll give you the information you need based on your objective, and more. That said, it’s sometimes simpler to collect data right from the platform as opposed to exporting it into an Excel file, because it’s visually easier to gather.

You can also create a custom metrics dashboard so it only provides you with the numbers you care about, and not the extras.

In conclusion, Facebook Ads are best for…

• Video view campaigns
• Growing your followers
• Re-targeting for retail businesses
  
  

Twitter Advertising

Reach/Budget

Let’s not beat around the bush: Twitter is expensive. However, with Facebook’s algorithm changing regularly, it may not stay this way forever.

With a larger budget permitting more than just Facebook, your reach can be quite extensive. The benefit here is that Twitter allows you to get very specific with your targeting, and reach those who are more invested in your band.

Targeting

Twitter allows you to target more effortlessly and with more detail than Facebook. Other than the usual details (location, gender, and language), you can target based on hashtags, key words, interests, and specific accounts and their followers. This means you can directly focus on your competitors, and that’s a marketer’s dream.

Twitter is where people go for news, trends, and immediate world updates. This is a major advantage for large companies. Take Google, for example.

On October 4, 2016, Google announced their new product, Pixel. If you weren’t watching live, you probably first heard the news on Twitter. That’s because the hashtag #MadeByGoogle was immediately trending and everyone was talking about it (in 140 characters or less).

Now imagine how easy it would be to target all those people if you are a competing tech company. You could take advantage of that massive reach and serve them your own ad.

Reporting

Twitter reporting is a little more renowned because it allows you to break down the metrics by audience segment (keyword, gender, handles, language, interests, platform, location).

This lets you see which fans are the ones engaging with your posts. As takeflyte puts it, “Being able to pinpoint exactly which segments of your audience is working and which ones aren’t is a simple task that will help you improve your ROI.”

In conclusion, Twitter Ads are best for…

• Product launches
• Holiday campaigns

At the end of the day, testing is key. If you have the budget, try both platforms to see where your audience is most engaging with your brand.