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Posted On Jun-09-2010 | by Steven Taylor, Jan Benschop

If you are a member of Facebook or Twitter, or both, and you have a business you want to promote, the thought of advertising on these social networks has no doubt crossed your mind. So you’re left to wonder on which network your particular business would do better.

Well, a couple of companies named Irbtrax (http://www.irbtrax.com/) and Bateman Group (http://batemangroup.com/) did some studies on just that question, and here is what they came up with, in a nutshell:

If you want to start a running conversation or invite commentary about something, Facebook is the front-runner, due to its wall feature. Think of it like a huge wall-hung corkboard in your student center, or business lobby, or community center or library. You can hang a standard sized sheet of paper filled with type and color photos and contact links. All your friends or all the people you grant access to on your wall get your message simultaneously, and can all comment or react to your message. The sheet stays up as long as you want. You can make it as personal as you want, using what you know about your friends to make it speak to them more intimately. If people really like what you have to offer, they will pass it on virally, making it spread quickly and widely.

On the other hand, Facebook is starting to show signs of losing some of its caché, especially in the younger demographics, due to awkwardness and perceptions associated with being dropped as a “friend.” At the same time, the over 50 crowd is growing by leaps and bounds. One way to interpret this is that as in real life, social interaction gets easier and less emotionally charged when you get older. Keep in mind that as you get older, you generally earn more, too, so from a marketing perspective, unless your business caters strictly to the very young, having an older demographic is a good thing.

Now, say you have a sale running for a few days, or you’re doing a concert or selling tickets to a concert. Or say you’ve just released a new song to iTunes or some other music download service. The operative words are “time-sensitive.” Here is where Twitter has the edge. Or, say you have a business selling to other businesses, either wholesale or in some other professional capacity. Twitter is purpose-layered, with one layer devoted purely to business interaction: if you construct your Twitter messages with SEO to “funnel” into your target audience, it can go viral in a New York minute.

Twitter is the newest thing in mainstream social networking, and its terse message size is an advantage in a world where information overload can turn a youngster away quicker than you can say, “food fight.” If youth is your target audience, Twitter is your network.

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