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Twitter vs Facebook

In a world where we have lots of communication channels, more and more people use social networking for keeping in touch with each other and making new friends. Nowadays,Twitter and Facebook are two of the most popular social networking sites that people across the world use with Twitter estimated to have 250 million users posting 72 million tweets per day, and Facebook estimated to have 800 milion users posting 600 million messages per day. Both Facebook and Twitter have so many features to offer to their users with several lack and excess. This essay will compare these two brands that seem to become a world wide obsession and one of the best ways to promote a thing. Facebook is a social networking site launched in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommate from Harvard. First the website was available only for Harvard students, after a few months it was available for most of the ivy league students in America and after two years Facebook was opened to all people of age 13 and older that have an e-mail account. By January 2009 Facebook was the most used social network with world wide active users. For users facebook offer what could turn into a universal login (David Kirkpatrick,2010). Same as Facebook, Twitter was launched for world wide users in 2006. Twitter is a social network and blogging site that lets users pots and read messages known as tweets. These tweets are posted to your profile or blog, so all your followers can see them. Messages can be searchable with Twitter search and your followers can re-tweet, them, by sharing your posts your posts or what you said with their own followers or contacts. Being re-tweeted is the highest compliment you can get on Twitter. When it comes to type of user accounts Facebook clearly takes the lead. You can choose from two main categories: personal account or business account. With personal accounts you can connect to your friends and relatives, post information about yourself, share photos and videos, post your thoughts and join different type of groups . For sportspeople, celebreties,websites, or companies facebook created special type of account that simple users can like ,not add them in their friends list, so this pages will be added in their interests group . The more likes the page has, the more people are subscribed to the pages feeds. Having a personal account doesnt mean you can have a business page too. You can use your personal account to create a business page, in fact that is exactly what Facebook wants you to do . From the personal profile you can administer any number of business pages or groups. There is an option to let someone else administer your business page without giving them your account information. These pages are a very effective way to promote your business and showcase your brand personality. You can keep people interested by posting relevant content witch involves being succinct friendly and conversational. However the main important way to promote your business is creating Facebook ads. Facebook Ads are paid messages coming from businesses and they can include social context about friends. People who like your Page spend an average of 2 times more as your customers than people who arent connected to you on Facebook. Twitter also has two types of accounts : personal and business. Unfortunately ,these accounts havent got as many customizing options as facebook accounts and their main use is posting messages to their followers. In my opinion Twitter has a different target of people than Facebook , who instant messaging and blogging. So Twitter was developed as a great tool for quickly communicating a message to a group of people. The main ability offered by your account is to follow people and have followers. Robert
Scoble(2010) states that the main advantage of Twitter is that its lets us hear from a large amount of people in a small time period. A lot of celebrities ,bands or large companies have a twitter account for

updating people about different things. For example companies can update people about sales or new products that are coming up and bands can update their followers about a new concert they are having. An other important thing about these two social networking sites is privacy . Lately, Facebook has changed their privacy policy. They make Facebook page more secure than before, you still can share contents visibility to everyone but it has a limit. Once you able to restrain of all the change, Facebooks setting page is really simple, just check list of what information you want people to see, and what you do not want them to see. Differ from Twitter, Twitter is very much an open network. But still, Twitter does let you control everything you want to. You can protect your tweets for them to be visible to limited person, your friends for example. But by doing that, you would not be able to interact with as many people you want. The second is about photos on Facebook and Twitter. I think the biggest feature of Facebook is the photos. It has influence million of people to constantly take, tag, and browse through hundreds of photos to everyone you want. But this is obviously something that Twitter had been leaking. Because when you want to sharing photos with your follower, these photos did have to be stored within another service such as Twitpic or yfrog. So this is the biggest lacking of Twitter, you can post photos directly in Facebook and put together in galleries, whereas with Twitter you can only link to one photo at a time. The last important things about this two sites is usability. Some people prefer the simple and easy to use interface of Twitter and other like Facebook more because the interface is more customizable and offers more facilities. One of these facilities are the apps that can be created on facebook . The apps can be very complex such as games, photo contests, quiz or live streams from different locations. In conclusion all the features Facebook offers make them gain more users and be more popular than Twitter, although there are people that use both. As a personal opinion I like Facebook more because I can customize my photography portfolios and promote my photography page. I also like the fact that I can keep in touch with my friends, family and colleagues, share photos and chat with them whenever I want.

Muresan Ramon

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