social media-twitter

New social media, like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are being adopted by a growing number of entrepreneurs who seek to deploy them for the benefit of their business.( Fischer,Reuber,2010)Twitter Inc. was founded in 2006 and the company has recently been valued at over one billion dollars (Corkery and Vascellaro,2009). In the year betweenMay 2008 andMay 2009 the number of users jumped from1.6 million to 32.1 million (Vascellaro, 2009); In April 2010 Twitter reported that they had more than 105.7 million registered users (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/twitter-user-statistics-r_n_537992.html).

What is the difference between Facebook and twitter？

Compared with Facebook，twitter is quite new and it enables social interaction that is more dynamic and less time-consuming, yet oriented less than Facebook towards the entrepreneur's personal network( Fischer,Reuber,2010). Fischer and Reuber(2010) did a study which believed that Facebook involved more personal commitment and less wide-scale public exposure compared with Twitter; for example, one stated:

“Facebook is a cocktail party and so when you are engaged in Facebook you're surrounded, sometimes very peripherally but surrounded, by people that you know and you like and that are part of your social graph. Twitter's not that. Twitter is more like somebody standing on the street corner with a megaphone saying, “(( Fischer,Reuber,2010,Informant 11)

According to these characteristics, the social media marketing strategies of twitter could be more special compared with Facebook.

1).Twitter is more suitable for the not-well-known brand, while Facebook is more used for the well-known brand such as ZARA, H&M.

Because twitter spreads more fast and more wilder, it is a fabulous channel for retailers to build up the brand image and brand awareness. But for Facebook,people who have know the brand and the company, would possibly have a look at the website and even be a fans of the brand.Twitter is used innovatively by established firms to perform core business functions that existed before Twitter, such as sales, customer service and branding. (Fischer,Reuber,2010)

2).Twitter could get more wilder and faster promotion effect.

For Facebook, people who have some common characteristic would be in one group or would be the fans of one retailer. So, the promotion through Facebook could only be spread in one specific group but for twitter, tweet is easily post and broadcasted. So even more people could see the promotion and events.

Dell and Starbucks offer coupons through Twitter to promote sales (Miller, 2009).

3). Complains online about Poor service are easily broadcasted by disgruntled customers.

Because of the fast spreading and wild using, complains are easily broadcasted in a large scale. So companies such as Pizza Hut, Comcast, and Southwest Airlines are hiring people tomonitor the Twittersphere for negative comments and respond instantaneously (Reisner, 2009).

These 3 points above are only some of my personal thoughts and Scholarly research on social media in general has now largely focused on how it may be used by companies as a marketing tool to monitor a marketplace (e.g. Berinato, 2010) or increase marketing communication effectiveness (e.g. Dholakia and Durham, 2010;Kozinets et al., 2010; Trusov et al., 2009). So, more functions would be discovered in the not- far- future.