Social media platforms have emerged as a significant force to be reckoned with to the point that it can even hush down political leaders, celebrities, and influential public personalities. While it can be a double-edged sword, the immense following it generates all around the globe is truly a marvel to behold.
Within minutes things can go viral and instantly reach news highlights. No wonder businesses nowadays are actively engaging themselves to promote their ventures and offers on social media.
According to a recent report by HubSpot, nearly 50% of the world population uses social media, which is over 3 billion users worldwide. Furthermore, LinkedIn has more than 690 million active users, while Twitter has over 330 million monthly active users.
Taking this information into perspective, let’s take a quick look at how these platforms can help your brands become popular.
Key Differences You Must Know
Before we jump into the intricate details that make each one of these platforms appropriate for promoting your brands and business, here are some key differences between them to make you ponder.
#1. Appropriate Self-Promotion
When it comes to self-promotion, it seems like both Twitter and LinkedIn chose their own unique approaches. LinkedIn by far has a much more professional outlook for a business to self-promote their activities, events, and products, whereas Twitter is more open to casual promotion but nothing too hefty as many would open frown upon it.
However, Twitter is no doubt more on the fun and high energetic side than LinkedIn, which is more reserved and keeps an air of panache. So if you are a youth-inspired brand that is up and happening, then Twitter is the place where you can try outlandish marketing tactics. It’s all about understanding the community’s general view and how both the platforms operate in a different zone altogether.
In short, Twitter is your date from high-school, while LinkedIn is your first meeting with your date’s parents. Take the example of Impact and see the difference in how they present themselves a little differently on the two platforms:
While the message, theme, and overall branding with the logo and other visuals remain the same. They tweak their intro to suit their audiences in a way that can allow them to connect with them easily.
#2. Community & Followership
To delve further on how both these platforms differ from each other, let’s take an overview of the general community and the types of users each one focuses on. LinkedIn, without any second guesses, emphasizes your professional identity and uses your own accomplishments to build and engage with a professional network that slowly starts to grow around it.
It is very much business and employment-related and thus delivers a professional networking platform. Twitter, on the other hand, is technically a microblogging and social networking service that covers a range of topics, from popular sports, entertainment, celebrities, to politics and breaking news.
Hence by merely studying how people use each platform, you can determine the approach needed by your brand to promote its services and products on each platform. Let’s take the example of a recent post from Coca-Cola Company and how they differ a little even though they deliver the same message:
While the message indeed carries its serious tone, see how the image on Twitter follows a comic book style of the text, while for LinkedIn, the text is a quote from James Quincey. This shows that the Coca-Cola Company understands the type of followership they get on both the platforms varies.
#3. Difference in Tone
The communication on LinkedIn differs greatly from the one that is used on Twitter. While on Twitter, it all guns and blazes; however, on LinkedIn, the tone can get pretty steely. Hence the freedom to express yourself is more open on Twitter, while on LinkedIn, it is considered unruly to go all out.
Similarly, being more vibrant on Twitter shows that you are confident, leading people to be more intrigued by you. However, the same can be said for LinkedIn but keeping a professional undertone is a must. There is a lot of set of eyes watching how you behave on LinkedIn, and naturally, your first instinct is to behave.
While on Twitter, you are expected to really show what you mean by, at times, overall expressing your thoughts to get people’s attention. Hence this difference in the way we communicate sets the basis for your approach to market and sell your products and services on these two platforms.
This can be further elaborated with the example of Ford Motors, where likability contrasts with informing stakeholders to join them in building an unparalleled future for the automobile industry:
Why do they do this, you may ask, and the answer is simple. Ford Motors know their audience and what they want to accomplish from each of the two platforms. Hence one uses an inviting tone that is more vibrant while the other offers a professional outlook and inspiring the future.
#4. Preferences of People
Preferences for people matter more these days, and in the future, they will be the tipping point for businesses to make sales and sustain profitability both in the long and the short run.
This is why personalized and customized services are much more preferable and get the most attention nowadays. However, as I mentioned earlier, it is all about awareness of time and space.
As a business, you must understand how both these platforms are unique from each other, and I would further evaluate them as we go along. The best example for this can be Nike, where, in the wake of recent events and the Black Lives Matter movement, the company posted the following on its official social media accounts:
While for Twitter, Nike prefers to go out with an astoundingly heartwarming video, and for LinkedIn, they simply go all out by showing how their business cares for people belonging from diverse cultures and backgrounds.
Twitter Pros & Cons
Twitter is indeed a great platform for marketing your business and brand, but nothing is perfect in this world. Let’s take a look at its strengths and weaknesses.
Pros:
Here are the three pros of using Twitter:
Brevity
Tweets bring in the sense of brevity where users must be precise in their choice of words, which further augments the message’s clarity. With a room for only 280 characters available, you are bound as a user to deliver your complete message and draw a picture with the given limit to get your idea across.
Hence you would find a lot of users implementing jargon, abbreviations, and shortened links in their post. While the shortness of allowed space may bother some, however, it is great for the users as in a matter of seconds, they can get hold of the idea you are pursuing or chasing after.
Hence there is more to know and less to read, making it an enjoyable and light-hearted experience for users.
Likability
While Twitter and LinkedIn both offer you various options to like and up-vote a post by showing your reaction to it, Twitter is mostly run based on likability. This means as long as someone is re-tweeting your post, it never actually dies or fades away.
Plus, one should not underestimate how long people would remember a funny tweet or a punch line. Some tweets are legendary and can show up on other platforms as well just because they are that much likeable and shareable by the users.
Relationships
Relationship building on Twitter is pretty much very accessible. All you need is an authenticity to back up your profile, and you can instantly start building relationships with users online. This can also lead to real-life conversations and even working relationships.
Cons:
Below mentioned is the major con of using Twitter:
TMI
Perhaps the only problem with Twitter is that at times things can go overboard. Since there is no actual filter to tell people when to stop yodeling, you might end up with exchanges that can raise the stakes higher than your liking. Hence there is a chance where TMI (too much information) may come into play and change the direction of your initiative completely to something bizarre and unwanted.
LinkedIn Pros & Cons
Like Twitter, LinkedIn also has its own strength and weaknesses. They are as follows:
Pros:
Here are the three pros of using LinkedIn:
Formality
Formality offered by LinkedIn can play very for businesses as it offers them a pretty straight forward approach to keep things direct and to the point. Hence any accomplishment or milestone can instantly be highlighted for users, and it is considered as something preferable. So if you have any good news to share about your business growth that can make stakeholders interested in investing your business, this is where you can attract them.
Professionalism
What is professionalism? It is the practice of how professionals act, and this makes them differentiable from amateurs. There is a whole lot that businesses can learn from this simple term, and that is all about being aware of what is expected from them so that viewers and users can professionally look at them. Naturally, expectations are higher, but this also allows you to show off just how damn good you are.
Space to Elaborate
Lastly, there is tons of space available to write and promote your products and services. LinkedIn statuses can be up to 700 characters long on company page posts while they can be 1,300 characters for individual accounts.
That is an exponential increase from Twitter; however, it is important to know that anything over 120,000 characters will get cut off from LinkedIn’s blogging network. Nevertheless, that is still a viable space for you to include tons of promotional messages pretty much and get away with it by the end of the day.
Cons:
The only con of using LinkedIn is discussed below:
Limited Sharing
There are hardly any LinkedIn shares, considering that other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts are buzzing with user activity when social sharing is compared. This might be because many view LinkedIn post strictly for businesses and work-related while other platforms are more open and vibrant in that sense.
That is why many out there would prefer other platforms as they can offer you better business branding strategies and tactics that you can deploy.
Using LinkedIn & Twitter Together
If you think that winners online are either using Twitter or LinkedIn, you couldn’t be as far from reality as possible. The smart people out there aren’t using LinkedIn or Twitter. In fact, they are using both of them together.
Both LinkedIn and Twitter together are considered ideal solutions for your business, and separately you are just undermining the power each social media platform for business holds for you.
Twitter gives you the edge to find and engage new buyers. LinkedIn offers you the ability to research your options, the market, competitors, and other players that might pique your interest. LinkedIn wants you to put your best conduct on display while Twitter is ideal for chasing after new customers based on their activities, such as tweets and hashtags.
Here are some quick tips to further master you use of these platforms side by side:
- Find out the people who have recently liked your tweet for became your follower online using Twitter.
- Now find these people and their professional profiles on LinkedIn.
Hence, now you would have a pretty good idea of how they interact with the world around them, which means their professional network. By linking the two, you would understand their preferences in life and thus give you the edge you need to devise a customized and personalized message for them to further build interactions and engagements with them.
Conclusion
While both Twitter and LinkedIn vary greatly from each other in many aspects, there is no doubt that using them together for your business and brand promotion can offer you a much better chance to score leads and gain future sales.
I hope this post was able to offer you some meaningful insights that you would be able to deploy for your own upcoming marketing campaigns. For further queries, feel free to mention your questions in the comment section below. Till next time, all the best for your future endeavors, CHEERS!!!
About the Author!
Stella Lincoln is working as an e-Commerce Specialist at Dissertation Assistance, a highly trusted academic writing platform with a team of dedicated research experts. During her free time, she likes to explore natural and scenic beauty around her as well as taking road trips with friends and loved ones.
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