There was a time when social media was new, innovative and wildly diverse. Digital marketing companies had their pick of dozens of viable platforms that performed different services for different audiences. Consumers segmented themselves into groups depending on their interests. However, that time was long ago—at least in Internet years.
The social media landscape today is becoming increasingly homogenized. Twitter and Facebook are seemingly blurring together. It seems that if they don’t stop imitating each other, soon the only difference between the two will be the shade of blue in their logos.
This presents interesting problems for digital marketing companies. How can they continue to use social media marketing effectively as traditional platforms shift and become increasingly irrelevant? Is it still important to use different techniques across different platforms, or it is possible to use a single strategy across all platforms?
The landscape may have changed, but the fundamentals of social media marketing remain the same. In fact, the imitation game Twitter and Facebook have been playing over the past few years might actually be helpful to digital companies. It allows them to target different demographics using the same basic techniques.
Both Facebook and Twitter rely heavily on multimedia. Videos, GIFs and images yield much higher rates of engagement than simple text updates, so both platforms feature them extensively. However, despite the similarities between the platforms’ functionality, they are used by very different people.
Facebook’s population has grown dramatically older over recent years, while Twitter has become increasingly business-oriented. Young innovators—the ones who used to live on these platforms—have moved to newer platforms like Snapchat and Periscope. It’s important for marketing companies to identify their audience before worrying about how to engage with them. If anything, Facebook and Twitter are easier to use for marketing now than they ever were, simply because their populations are so conveniently segmented.
