Social Media Marketing is about Twitter and nothing else. You may be wondering: “What about Facebook? Linkedin? and Youtube?” Forget Facebook and LinkedIn. Those two are great when there is one specific person you must get in contact with. Search on google and find their Linked and Facebook profile. Message them on Facebook, and pay to message them through LinkedIn. Youtube is a different story--if you make video content, it’s obviously a go to source. We’ll cover that too. But for now for all intents and purposes, we’re going to focus on Twitter.

Let’s compare Twitter to Facebook to get a deep understanding of why it’s all about Twitter. First off, Facebook doesn’t let you follow anyone you want. Twitter does. But more importantly, Twitter let’s you basically send a public message to anyone, whereas Facebook only allows you to send a private message to people you don’t know. That dynamic, though seamingly small, changes everything. The psychology is that when you @mention someone on twitter (that probably isn’t following you and has no idea who you are), they are more compelled to @mention back at you.

The reason is because your tweet is publicly available on the web. The recipient of your @mention knows that other people are possibly looking at your tweet, and is more likely to not want it to go unanswered. If someone you don’t know sends you a private Facebook message, nobody else in the world besides you two know this occurred. If you’re really busy, as most important online tastemakers/influencers are, you’re less likely to respond to it. Nobody will know that you didn’t give a shit about it.

This is similar to how Facebook comment wall widgets brings a lot more accountability to the comment posters. For example, before Techcrunch implemented Facebook comment walls, there were a lot more anonymous “trolls” writing garbage (and often hateful) comments. Facebook forces you to give up your true identity in your comment, and even links to your Facebook profile. So when Techcrunch implemented the Facebook comment wall widget, the quality of comments greatly increased because people had to represent themselves non-anonymously. So similarly because Twitter puts everyone right out there in the open, people feel a lot more obliged to write quality responses to your @mentions, and respond in the first place.  

The net result here is that you can get the attention of anyone.

There are several other reasons here why you can get the attention of people better on Twitter than Facebook. Twitter’s simple interface (and that of the various client applications like Tweet Deck) is about the stream and almost nothing else. This keeps people focused on 2 things:

A) reading tweets

B) responding to tweets

The interface is conducive to responding to people that @mention you. Therefore when you reach out to a famous influencer in your niche, they’re more likely to respond to you. They almost feel it’s their duty. Facebook is about private personal real in-person relationships. Twitter is about getting yourself out there. People get themselves out there have a responsibility to respond to people that @mention them, just like celebrities have to sign signatures. On Facebook, it’s almost taboo to spam/message people you don’t know.

The last reason Twitter makes it so easy to get in touch with influencers is because of the deep ties between a twitter account and a blog/site. In the short description of a twitter profile, there usually is a link to a blog. People make these twitter profiles in the first place to promote their own blog. On the blog itself is often a stream of their most recent tweets. There are also widgets that list other tweets @mentioning you. This all contributes to the responsibility of the blog owner (i.e. an important influencer) to respond to @mentions. They are there on Twitter in the first place to promote their blog. If you @mention them saying you loved one of their articles, the blog owner will feel obliged to respond back to you thanking you for your appreciation. And of course your @mentions can be way more meaningful than that and ultimately lead to real relationships with these famous tastemaking influencers. capiche. That’s where this is all going.

And I’m going to end this tutorial by repeating what I wrote above:

The net result here is that you can get the attention of anyone.