Click to download a pdf of this chart, recently published on CMO.com

Social media is often clumped together and shoved into the same pigeon hole. But the two main sites, Facebook and Twitter, are actually very different. All they have in common is that they enable people to connect, interact and share content, and there the similarities end.

So which is best for marketing? Well, it depends on your target audience and the type of marketing you want to deliver…

Marketing on Twitter

Twitter is a lot more news driven than Facebook. People are constantly posting links, Retweeting and commenting on the latest topics in a constant stream of discussion. It’s why it’s often compared to a cocktail party. This makes it ideal for pushing out links to press releases, blog posts and industry news. Just remember that nobody likes a bore who only talks about themselves, so interact and don’t focus too much on trying to impress people.

Another difference with Facebook is their audiences. Facebook is seen as being populated by a fun loving under 30s crowd, whereas Twitter has an older, more professional audience. Twitter users are more interested in connecting with other people in their industry than playing Farmville, which makes it a more suitable place for posting business related news.

Perhaps Twitter’s biggest appeal for marketers is its ability to spread news virally. Thanks to keyword search tools and #hashtags, your Tweets can get picked up by relevant Twitter users and spread amongst 100s or 1000s of users in a matter of hours. Third party monitoring tools (such as Hootsuite, TwitJump and TweetBeep) also make it easy to track the success of your marketing efforts and gauge how to improve them.

Marketing on Facebook

With 400 million active users compared to Twitter’s 75 million, Facebook’s massive user base gives it the edge when you’re looking to attract as many people as possible to your brand. Facebook ‘Fan page’ feature makes it quick and easy to build your own minisites, in which you can add photos, videos and post updates.

The static nature of Facebook also makes it much better for interactivity. People can post comments and engage with your brand on an ongoing basis, with messages remaining visible to other users for days or weeks afterwards.

Facebook’s instant messaging feature also gives it the edge over Twitter’s direct messaging function for enabling one-to-one communication with your company.

So which is best?

If you had to choose, my advice would be Twitter for targeting a professional, news hungry B2B audience whereas Facebook is more suitable for B2C. Twitter is great for giving your business a voice and getting your industry related content to interested followers. Facebook’s Fan pages and interactivity makes it better for engagement on an ongoing basis.

However, both are free, quick and easy to use, so why not give both a try? Just don’t expect results overnight and be prepared to experiment to find out what works best for you.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

If you work in direct marketing you might be keeping a low profile at the moment. Following the Royal Mail’s decision to abolish the limit on unaddressed mail, people are angry about the prospect of torrents of junk mail flooding through their letterbox.

Judging by the outcry, it appears that unaddressed mail is about as popular as traffic wardens and the Ebola virus. People see it as an unwanted and intrusive abuse of their attention, and that cutting down trees to print pizza flyers and insurance leaflets is an environmental crime. In many people’s eyes, all direct marketing falls in the same pigeon hole as printed spam.

But there’s a big distinction between unaddressed mail and the targeted campaigns sent by modern direct marketers. Unaddressed mail’s aim is simply to spread its advertising message as widely as possible. Direct mail, on the other hand, is far more advanced and precisely targeted.

Targeted direct mail is more relevant

Direct marketing has evolved a lot since the days of delivering the same message to as many people as possible. Now the game is about personalisation, segmentation and relevance.

If you own a sportswear company, for example, it’s now possible to send customers brochures that are customised to match their buying history and interests. Personalising direct marketing, in this way, means it’s more relevant and offers a higher conversion rate than simply sending the exact same brochure to every customer.

The fact that you’re only sending people messages they’re interested in also means you’re vastly reducing waste, in both expense and paper.

Targeted direct marketing offers the introduction to digital

There’s a simple reason why businesses of all types continue to use direct mail: it works. Despite all the fuss over Facebook and Twitter, surveys show that people prefer to receive marketing messages in print. This means direct mail can act as the ignition for integrated campaigns by introducing your offer and directing people to your website.

Integrated print campaigns are particularly effective when you take advantage of personalised URL (PURL) technology. This enables you to include a website address in your direct mail featuring the customer’s name e.g. http://www.thinkbda.com/davidknowles.

People love to see their own name in print, and will be curious to see what’s on their personally addressed website. Once they’ve landed, you can then capture valuable nuggets of data on page views, record entries and mouse clicks, which are all fed into your database. This data can then be used to make future campaigns even more targeted and relevant to your customers

So, if you work in direct marketing and become embroiled in the junk mail debate – stand your ground. Targeted direct marketing is more relevant, personalised and effective than its unaddressed cousin, and doesn’t deserve to be placed in the same coop, let along the same pigeon hole, as ’junk mail’.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

With over 90% of the world’s emails classified as spam, it’s inevitable that scammers will try to infiltrate the latest technology to fill their pockets. Social media services are under increasing attack, with phishers desperate to snare people’s login details.

Last month, Twitter was subjected to a series of outbreaks of phishing emails and direct messages sent to its members. High profile victims included Ed Miliband MP and First Direct, whose hacked accounts were used to advertise dodgy knock-off pills and post links to scammy websites.

This video explains the outbreak in more depth:

Since the outbreak, Twitter’s technicians have been busy in their lab devising a solution. This week they emerged to announce that Twitter would now be screening all links in direct messages and emails to make sure they didn’t send people to fake phishing websites or anywhere else a little iffy.

Twitter has yet to confirm whether it will also start screening links in Tweets as well. But maybe it should – according to a recent study 10% of Twitter traffic is already junk, and it’s only going to rise…

Four Twitter Spam tactics

If you’re a Twitter user you might recognise a few of these by now:

1. Profile picture of a pretty girl and endless, moronic Tweets pitching products. The aim of these accounts is to follow as many people as possible so that when users check to see who’s following them they see the spammy messages
2. The hijacking of hashtags and popular topics by adding keywords to promotional messages. Habitat faced a PR disaster after it used interest in the Iranian election as an opportunity to flog its latest in-store discounts
3. Auto posting Tweets with scraped content to direct people to spammy websites filled with Adsense ads and affiliate links
4. Although this isn’t strictly spam, it’s still annoying – accounts with autoresponder messages which ask you to download their eBook or signup for their webinar the moment you start following them

MySpace has already been ruined, for many people, by its abundance of fake accounts and ‘friend’ requests from spammers.

Let’s hope Twitter doesn’t go the same way and steps up its efforts to combat spam. Otherwise it risks the user experience becoming ruined and having to watch its chances of making money fly out of the window.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It could be said that there are two key factors to delivering a marketing message:

1. Knowing what message to deliver
2. Knowing which platform to deliver it on

Based on some stats recently released by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), it would appear that mobile web is fast becoming a platform to focus on.

The survey’s highlights include:

• 10 million people in the UK now browse the internet on their mobile every week
• Those accessing the mobile web do so for on average 6.3 hours/week
• That’s more time than they spend reading newspapers (5.3hrs) or magazines (3.7hrs)
• 46% use the internet whilst watching TV

These stats simply reinforce what us marketers already know: marketing on mobile is going to be huge. Very soon, having a mobile element to your marketing campaign will be a must, rather than an option.

But before you rush off to start designing your mobile apps and widgets, you need to consider whether your customers are active mobile web users. After all, the mobile web is still a predominantly young user base.

Whilst the EIAA survey found that 43% of 16-24 year olds and 26% of 25-34 year olds are accessing the mobile web regularly, I expect the numbers plummet past 35.

The fact is that despite all the fanfares on the millions now accessing Facebook and using branded apps on their mobiles – millions aren’t.

Why Labour’s focus on direct mail is a smart move

Some have been quick to judge the Labour party’s decision to allocate most of its budget to direct mail as a sign that it ‘doesn’t get’ the internet and is past the times. But focusing on direct mail might, actually, be a smart move.

With modern digital printing technology, they can create campaigns which are personalised to feature local issues, as well as those of national concern. Making their marketing more relevant to each individual means it could be more effective than a high profile poster campaign delivering the same message to every passer by.

If they had the budget for it, I’m sure Labour would have happily blitzed every platform. But focusing on direct mail is probably their best chance of engaging with their traditional Labour support base. Spending millions on mobile isn’t, yet, the most suitable strategy.

If Labour were really smart, they’d be integrating their direct mail with personalised URLs leading voters to websites customised with policies to match each voter’s interests. Maybe by the next election their marketing will have caught up.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.