Four Business Advantages Twitter Gives You Vs. LinkedIn and Facebook to Reach the Right People

Every social network has its strengths and its weaknesses. Twitter’s biggest weakness is that it’s misunderstood by many business owners who don’t know how to harness the firehose of information that’s published every second or haven’t discovered how to get their messages heard above the noise.

Twitter’s biggest strength — the one you want to leverage — is that it can connect you to the right people fast.

Advantage 1: Starting a Conversation with a Prospect for Your Business

First of all, Twitter is the most open of all of the social media networks. You can start a conversation with literally anyone (unless they have a protected feed) by including their username, starting with the @ symbol, in a Tweet.

This is public, of course, so you want to be mindful of what you say, but if done right, it’s a great icebreaker to invite further conversation on other channels. People on Twitter usually want to be noticed, so they often reply (assuming you look like a real person or business and not a robot spammer).

On Facebook, to send a message to someone outside your network, the message ends up in the “other” messages folder or the “message requests” or worst yet “filtered messages.” These messages are largely ignored because (1) most people don’t know other message folders exist and (2) most messages in those folders start with “Hello Dear” (yuck!) and seem like fake accounts.

On LinkedIn, to send a message to someone outside your network, you either have to pay for a premium account which includes InMail, or you have to pay for InMail. Attitudes on LinkedIn are tough to crack, too, because so many people are receiving random, un-targeted sales messages, which can lead to message fatigue.

Advantage 2: Using External Links

Twitter expects you to include links in your Tweets. The Powers-That-Be know there’s no way to tell the whole story in 140 characters, so they gladly let you add links to send people to other pages when you Tweet. And people will click on them if they like them. Add the right hashtag, and more people will discover what you posted.

This is in sharp contrast to Facebook. People on Facebook are too busy messaging their friends and reading their friends’ updates to click your link. Mostly, they’re just not in the mood to leave, and Facebook seems to want them to stay.

Facebook’s algorithm seems to hide posts with external links, or at least show them to fewer people, based on anecdotal evidence of Facebook group owners and people who post frequently.

LinkedIn doesn’t seem to have an issue with external links, although it does convert them with LinkedIn’s own link shortener. Depending on the size of your network, there may be fewer people reading the updates since they have to be connected to your network or following you to see them.

LinkedIn’s audience tends to get mean in the comments sections, too, when people post things that aren’t related directly to work topics.

Advantage 3: Reaching Journalists and Bloggers

Twitter is often the best way to reach out to Journalists and Bloggers. They read their mentions (Tweets that include their usernames) for story ideas, and it’s a lot less crowded than competing for attention in their email inboxes. The instant nature and mobile-friendliness of Twitter make it easy for journalists to read quickly and find out if they need to take further action.

Facebook does have journalists and bloggers, but since there isn’t a 140-character maximum, and since comments are threaded, it’s a lot harder to sift through the comments very quickly. It gets even tricker on mobile phones: They need three apps installed for Facebook (Facebook, Messenger and Pages), and if they’re not checking all of them regularly, they might miss a story idea.

Facebook is also sending them messages from their friends, and if you’ve ever turned off Facebook to get work done, you can see how it might make it hard for a journalist to get your message and respond quickly.

On LinkedIn, messages show as notifications on the mobile app, assuming the journalist has the app installed and configured to allow notifications. Messages can be sent to email, but again, only if the journalist has configured the settings to allow that. Even then, messages sent through LinkedIn to email are just adding to the enormous pile of emails a journalist sees every day, and could very easily get lost in the shuffle.

Advantage 4: Customer Service

Finally, Twitter is the absolute best way to get quality customer service quickly. Most big brands and service providers (not all) have higher-level customer support teams working around the clock and will follow you back and direct message you to solve your problem, usually in a matter of minutes. There’s no on-hold music. No phone trees. Just a polite, intelligent agent ready to help you as concisely as possible.

Customer retention specialists and marketers call this behavior “listening,” and most companies pay a lot of attention to it on Twitter.

All you have to do is follow the company and Tweet to them. Tell them you have a customer service issue or pre-sales question. Of course, you could also Tweet your complaints loudly and publicly about the problem you’re having, but it’s a lot friendlier and less antagonistic to just ask for a follow and discuss the problem privately with Direct Messages (DM’s).

Even though many companies have Facebook pages, it’s been my personal experience that you can can often wait a day or more for the answer, depending upon the size of the company you’re trying to reach.

Then there’s LinkedIn. Have you ever contacted a company to receive customer service on LinkedIn? I have never thought to go to LinkedIn first for a customer service issue.

Typically, I think of company pages on LinkedIn as a way to find out more about a company for hiring purposes than if something I bought broke. Let’s call this one “unknown” since I haven’t fully tested it. (If you have, I’d love to read your experience in the comments section).

So, there you have it, four situations where Twitter gives you the advantage of reaching people quickly for your business. So, get to Tweeting, and get results!

Holly Kolman is an online marketing mentor who specializes in positioning, messaging and using social media strategically to open sales conversations. Pssst — she can help you master Twitter. You can find her on Twitter as @mobileHolly.