Almost everyone, unless they’ve been living in a cave, knows about Facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, isn’t quite as popular, depending on which age demographic you’re talking about. Teens seem to have left Facebook in droves, choosing Twitter instead. Why is this? In this post we’ll give you some of our ideas on why this is happening.

Facebook Pros: 

1. You can keep in touch with family and friends easily and quickly.

2. Posting photos is easy.

3. Comments and status updates keep others up to date on what you do.

4. If you choose to, you can keep most things private.

Facebook Cons: 

1. It’s difficult to get the inside scoop on popular sports, entertainment and music stars.

2. Star’s pages are often not controlled by these stars. They hire other people to write the content. Some are not even affiliated with the stars.

3. It’s hard to mix politics, news and entertainment with friends and family. Sharing these things can lead to conflicts at home or at work.

4. It’s too easy to share everything about your life, including many things that you, perhaps, shouldn’t share.

5. It’s very difficult to maintain your privacy since these settings are always changing.

6. Facebook uses ads to make money.

That’s a basic run-down of the things that we see as detrimental to the Facebook experience. This particular social media has changed over the years and the Facebook you see now is nothing like it was when it started out. While the older generation’s interest in Facebook has increased, the younger generation has moved on to Twitter.

Twitter Pros: 

1. Twitter is instantaneous. What you see in the feed is brand new, for the most part. Anything that is older is usually marked as such. There are even sites that tell you if what you’re posting has been posted before. This keeps it current.

2. You can see what’s popular at this moment in the world, in your country or in your city.  This is called ‘trending’. If something happens, it becomes a hot topic and starts to trend. 

3. Twitter is words not pictures. You have to read to use it. There are reports that user’s literacy will increase, simply because they are reading tweets as opposed to looking at pictures.

4. Most popular users, big stars from every part of the sports and entertainment world, almost always post their own thoughts and opinions. This alone makes Twitter vastly superior to Facebook. If you want the inside scoop on anything to do with your ‘fave’ stars, Twitter is the place to be. Some stars get into trouble by being too honest but, love them or hate them, that’s something you don’t get on Facebook.

5. You can speak directly to people. Try that on Facebook! Your tweets to popular Twitter users, from every walk of life, can be read by those people and their followers. Your audience is immediately larger than you ever thought possible. Tweet to Justin Bieber, for instance, and there is a possible audience of over 45 million people.

6. Nothing about Twitter is complicated. You think up a tweet, keep it to 140 characters or less and post it. Sure, there are some simple things to learn, things such as hashtags for instance, but the learning curve is almost perfectly flat, nothing tough here.

Twitter Cons: 

1. It’s addicting. Following the feed can take up a lot of time, specially if something is happening in the world of the people you follow. Take NASCAR, for instance. Tweets during a race can flow almost as fast as the race itself. In a situation where the cars are stopped, for an accident let’s say, some drivers actually tweet from their cars. This should be in the plus side of things but you can see how addicting this might be.

2. It’s difficult sometimes to sort out your interests. Tweets come through in a big jumble which makes following a story fairly difficult. There are lists, however, which make this process much easier.

3. Trimming your words to 140 characters or less can be very difficult. The plus side of this is that you can develop the skills needed to get your point across in as few words as possible. Think of this as the haiku section of social media.

 

There you have it, a rundown of why we think Twitter is a bit more fun than Facebook. There are ways of sharing photos, too, in case that is your main concern. We’ll do a series of posts on Twitter this week to help you sort it all out. Stay tuned!

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