Millennial Marketing

One of my Twitter buddies, Stuart Robertson (aka ‘designmeme’), tweeted me this bit of wisdom yesterday:

@carol_phillips Facebook is the backyard BBQ, Twitter is the Convention, MySpace is the NightClub, LinkedIN is the Job Finding Club.

I promptly ‘retweeted’ his idea to my 179 ‘followers’. That ended an exchange that started like this yesterday morning:

designmeme: How To Turn Twitter Followers Into Friends http://tr.im/gQmg

carol_phillips: @designmeme Not sure I want followers as ‘friends’. That’s what I have Facebook for. Twitter brings me acquaintances with common interests.

This exchange illustrates what I have discovered to be Twitter’s primary attraction, which is to have “conversations” with people you would otherwise never meet. designmeme is on the faculty and web manager for University of Guelph-Humber. We are unlikely to have met anywhere other than cyberspace. We don’t care about what each of us had for lunch or even want to know any details of each other’s lives. I didn’t even know or care what his real name was until I started writing this post. But I like what Stuart has to say, and I must have said something that caught his attention, as well. And this is precisely the reason I think Twitter will be more important than Facebook: Twitter is not about friends, it’s about strangers.

The first lesson I learned about Twitter is to refrain from answering the prompt,what you are doing? No one, outside of those who love you, cares two tweets about what you are doing. But acquaintances and your larger network just might care about what you are reading, thinking and talking about. And that’s where Twitter comes in. Twitter is about ideas; you don’t need to be ‘friends’ to want to share ideas. In that sense, designmeme is right, Twitter is a convention, a virtual watercooler where interesting conversations are happening day and night. The conversations are easy to find and make little demands. You can just listen, or you can chime in.

In contrast, Facebook is the backyard BBQ. You can’t stand silent on Facebook you have to participate; Facebook is where you connect with people you know and like, aka, your friends. The in-house sociologist at Facebook, Cameron Marlow, revealed that most users actually communicate with a relatively small circle of friends. While many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only actively communicate with a few.

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:
Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:
Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 16 friends

I prefer Twitter to Facebook because I have other ways to connect with friends.

Most Millennials I know have yet to use Twitter. They prefer to talk to their friends online and Facebook is perfectly designed to do just that.It therefore comes as no surprise that the average Twitter user (Twitterer?) is older than the average Facebook user.

Which brings me to my point (yes, I have one): While they are lumped together as ‘social media’, LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are fundamentally different in ways that will be increasingly important for marketers to understand.

Because Facebook is intimate, it is inherently unfriendly to commercialization and marketers will continue to struggle to find a way to leverage it effectively. (The exception will be ‘events, such as Starbucks ‘Red’ event in December. Advertising a specific event (party) on a specific day makes perfect sense.) Because Twitter is about anonymity and connecting with people you don’t know very well, it is inherently much more friendly to breaking news, self-promotional messages, causes and ideas. I predict Twitter will surpass Facebook fairly quickly as a marketing medium.

Marketers: Start your tweeters.