Facebook vs Twitter: Which Social Network Is Better For Business?

In this blog post, I’ll make a comparison between Facebook and Twitter. Besides that, I’ll try to answer the questions like:

• How is Twitter used in business?
• What is the best way to use Facebook for your business?
• How to promote your business on Facebook and Twitter?

Both networks have their pros and cons, so let’s see them!

Who Has More Active Users?

Facebook grew the number of active users (per month) from 100 million people in 2008 to 1.7 billion in 2016. It’s a huge number and a huge opportunity.

Source: Statistia

Likewise, Twitter increased the number of their active users from 30 million in 2010 to 313 million in 2016.

Source: Statista

So it seems that Facebook has the numbers on its side, but don’t write Twitter off just yet.

Organic Reach: How Many Impressions Does Average Post or Tweet Get?

Every few months, you get the news that Facebook has changed the news feed algorithm and that you can expect a decrease in organic reach.

They obviously want to force the advertising, and that is the reason for the constant decrease of the organic reach. It’s a small cost for they gain with this strategy.

Take a look at this Convince & Convert chart:

See how their stock price is increasing while organic reach is going down? For every small down move of organic reach, people will invest more in Facebook Ads.

It makes much more sense now, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, you can expect 2.6% organic reach from your posts in average, but it depends a lot on the number of likes on your page.

Source: AdWeek

For an example, a page between 50,000 and 100,000 likes should have 7.47% organic reach, but that’s just statistics (I did say SHOULD, didn’t I?).

With various factors such as content quality, post timing, audience, and more, the best way is to do your own tests. It’s completely different situation on Twitter.

They don’t have a decrease in organic reach since users can see all tweets from the people they follow. The real question is: What is the average number of impressions per tweet? Well, this is a problem since there are no so much studies that reveal information about impressions.

However, according to Danny Sullivan from Marketing Land, he has 1.85% impression rate.

That’s 7,195 people out of 190,000 who follow him. Also, the most view tweet of Search Engine Land Twitter account, had 3.45% impressions, out of their followers.

As you can see, there is a huge difference (1.6%) between Danny’s account and SEL’s. This actually means you need to test for yourself, but these are great stats.

Engagement: How Many Clicks I Can Get?

According to Barometer, on Facebook, you can expect 5.3% engagement rate (like, share, click).

But it really depends on the type industry, number of likes, audience, timing, etc. If you think that days are irrelevant for engagement rates, think again.

One interesting study has found that engagement reaches the peak on Thursdays, followed by Fridays and Sundays.

On these days you can expect engagement rate to go up to 18% higher than the other days.

However, the study has also pointed that you need to consider the industry when scheduling your posts.

As far as Twitter is concerned, to get the most shares, the best time to post is 1 p.m. and to get the most clicks you should delay posting for two hours.

Source: QuickSprout

It’s important to say that the average Twitter CTR is 1.64%. Though it variates based on the number of the followers, truth is that the more followers you have the lower engagement rate you’ll get.

Just like on Facebook, choosing the right day can affect on how many clicks you’ll get. Posting on Sunday should bring the most clicks while Friday is actually the worst day for that activity.

Part of the day you tweet will also influence engagement.

For an example, Buffer study shows that in the US, the best hour for tweets is from 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. (CET).

Should I Advertise on Facebook or Twitter?

By now, you’ve already figured out that organic reach is not the only way to get attention on social networks.

You can also go for advertising! But before you do that, I’d suggest calculating these two metrics:

Knowing Churn Rate and ARPC (Average Revenue Per Customer) lets you calculate Customer Lifetime Value.

If we assume that your Monthly Churn Rate is 1% (which is slightly above the average in SaaS) and ARPC of $49, then it’s clear that your CLV is $4,900 ($49 ÷ 0.01).

This is for SaaS businesses, but you can calculate it for E-commerce too. Just think about customer retention and find out what is your CLV.

How much, in average, one acquired customer pays you during the lifecycle? Now when you know CLV, I’d like to mention another few metrics:

• Conversion Rate
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

For calculating CAC you can use a basic Google Sheet.

The data is telling you that the average CAC is equal to $57.24. Until your CAC is lower than CLV you’re making the profit - don’t forget including gross margin.

Which Posts Are More Valuable, Facebook or Twitter?

Impressions, organic reach, clicks, engagement statistics are all interesting, but the real stats are LEADS and CONVERSIONS.

That’s actually what we call WORTH. Do you know how much leads you get per 10,000 impressions or per 1,000 clicks? What are your industry benchmarks?

Although there is no a general rule of thumb, few several studies help us answering the question: Which social network is better for the business?

QuickSprout infographic shows us that 2.6% visits resulted as a purchase and from Twitter only 1.1%.

That’s not the only important data. Facebook shoppers will spend more time on your website - they will open 7 pages per visit.

On the other side, Twitter shoppers will go to 3 pages per visit. Surely, there is no right answer but it’s a good starting point. SumAll claims that $25.69 is the revenue generated by a single business tweet.

An interesting fact is actually that $20.37 is generated from a retweet. Jon Loomer has published a really interesting study about the value of Facebook posts.

The total value of his post is $989.47. It’s hard to say which social network is more worth because there are a lot of variables such as responsive design, CLV, churn rate, product, etc etc.

Conclusion

Currently, Facebook has a better engagement rate, but when you see the trends, it’s obvious that organic reach will continue to decrease.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook is doing everything to encourage you to advertise and will continue to that.

For that reason alone, I would suggest going for paid ads on Facebook (in order to keep reach), but don’t forget to tweet regularly on daily basis.

So which social network is better for business? No straight answer to that, and you would need to test it just to see what’s better for your businesses.

But if you ask me, I would go for Facebook, and here is why:

• 1.38B people are more on Facebook (bigger audience)
• Better engagement rate
• Posts are more worth

It doesn’t matter if you get more impressions on Twitter when engagement rate is better on Facebook.