Over the closing decade, social media has come to be an vital phase of our each day lives. These communication tools allow us to connect with family and friends, share information and stay updated on current events. The major social media networks are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each platform has its advantages and disadvantages, and it's important to understand how each functions so that you can choose the one that best suits your needs.
Both Twitter and Facebook started in 2007 and quickly gained popularity among internet users throughout the world. At first, only college students used these platforms, but word eventually spread to high school students as well as adults. Both platforms now have millions of users from all age groups around the world. In fact, China has more internet users than the United States does. Because these social media tools are popular with both young and old people, it's important to understand how these platforms work and which one is best for you to use.
To start, Twitter has a lot shorter limit for its tweets than Facebook does. Each tweet can only be up to 140 characters long, whereas Facebook posts can be up to 1000 characters long. This allows for much more concise messages on Twitter as compared to Facebook where longer posts are allowed. Plus, short messages get readily disseminated much more quickly on Twitter than they do on Facebook where posts must be at least one hundred characters long. As a result, Twitter is much better at communicating short thoughts such as quick updates on current events or responding to someone else's message. At the same time, Facebook is better at maintaining ongoing conversations with many people in one place at once.
In addition to these differences in length of message, Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter does. Currently there are 1 billion+ active users on Facebook compared to Twitter's rate of ~13 million+ monthly active users. This makes it much easier for people who want to spread messages or information about products or services to do so via Facebook- compared to trying the same thing with Twitter. Plus, facebook attracts more advertisers than twitter does making it easier for people to make a living from social media interactions alone. However, some people use both platforms and benefit from both sets of features.
Based off of these differences in how short vs long messages are handled and the size of their user bases, Twitter is better for spreading short thoughts or responding to someone else's message, while Facebook is better for maintaining ongoing conversations with many people in one place at once. Both are very popular social media tools used by millions of people worldwide- but each works best for different types of interactions based off of their unique features and limitations.