Twitter or Facebook; The result is in?

After looking back over my recent blog posts the most popular by a long way was the ‘Twitter or Facebook’ post. Some comments that came through were that ‘Facebook is more inclined towards games’ and ‘I struggled with Twitter at first’. Personally I don’t really like Facebook for business, but for keeping in contact with your friends it’s very useful.

If you are using Twitter for business it can be tricky to get your head around how best to use it for your business (hint, follow @markshaw), but once it clicks it’s really very easy to do.

One of the easiest things to do is build up a massive list of people you are following, which is great to keep up to date with things, but it also has the opposite effect that your timelines become meaningless. If you use something like Tweetdeck the constant audiable alerts drive you crazy if you follow a lot of people. How best can you get around this problem? Simple, build lists!

Lists are easy to create (see here) and offer another alternative to following people. You create lists based on various interests; I have them for the 30 day bloggers, businesses based in Yorkshire, influential people, ‘Dragons’ and people who take part in the #watercoolermoment discussion each day. You can view them publicly by visiting my twitter page.

The advantage of this is 2 fold. First of all you do not have the problem of a massive timeline with lots of tweets, so you can only follow people that will add value to your twitter feed; it might be fantastic to know what Lady Gaga is having for breakfast, but does it add value to your business? Secondly, it’s easy to load up your list and see what is happening/has been happening over the last few hours for that particular list category. It saves a lot of time because you know that if you visit your list titled ’30 day bloggers’ you will be able to see what people taking part in the challenge have been posting.

Another way I have found to keep informed is to create an account at paper.li and create a newspaper. Think it’s hard? It’s not. The intial groundwork takes some time, but once it is going it’s a piece of cake. What does Paper.li do?

Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format.

Create your account and then you can either create a newspaper based on people you follow, or by lists that you have saved, or by a hashtag or another search. The paper is then published at a time each day that you specify for you to read (and anyone else if you make it public). Why go to the trouble of creating it if you aren’t going to make it public?I have 2 papers which are published each day; one based around my timeline and another based around businesses based in Yorkshire which is generated from one of my lists. These papers are fantastic ways to keep up to date with things and saves you a lot of time going through your timeline as all the best posts are included in the paper. I have mine set to publish around tea time so that I can catch up on what’s been happening after tea, but not waste a lot of time doing so.To go back to the initial question: Facebook or Twitter? In my eyes it’s a no contest, Twitter every time.

What do you think?

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