Many brands today have both a Twitter Page and a Facebook Page or several of each. Clearly there is momentum on both sites, huge momentum and it is important to be in both places but given that resources are often scarce and you may have to choose which to invest more in, where is the better bet in terms of connecting to your customers and finding new customers. Both have benefits and ideally you have both and invest in both.

Twitter has the benefit today of search. You can’t search the Facebook stream (yet) and there is no global Facebook stream to search (again yet). With Twitter search though you can enter a keyword in and see the most recent Tweets and so a user searching for a specific term may find you if you have recently Tweeted about those words. That is a definite plus and I’ve found with some experiments that simple quantity of Tweets against a subject will build followers. The downside to this is Tweets have a very short lifespan when it comes to search. If you Tweet about a popular phrases yours will be lost in a matter of minutes or seconds and even if it is more of a long tail term it will only last in search for a few days. That means you need to Tweet a lot to attract followers through search. The downside there is the more you Tweet the more you will get ignored and unfollowed if your Tweets aren’t interesting. Quite the conundrum. Beyond search, even if you have a lot of followers there is so much noise on Twitter right now that you can still get lost in the shuffle. People Tweet with reckless abandon and so even your followers are likely to follow a lot of other Twitter users and so your Tweets can get lost. But there is a massive and fast growing audience and your Tweets are publicly searchable so its a good place to be.

Facebook Pages on the other hand are an interesting one. It seems the engagement on a Facebook Page post is stronger than on a Tweet. For example on one site I have the same number of followers (about 2000) as I do Facebook Fans (about 1700). A post on FB typically gets about 10 responses from that group. A Tweet may get none and typically gets 3-5 clicks although there is no way to tell how many of those come from search and how many are followers. Facebook has the benefit of most people using their real name and so an engagement there tends to be much more real. Facebook does have some clutter too although not as much as Twitter. Even if you have lots of friends, the noise doesn’t seem as high on Facebook and so your Page posts will get found. I think people tend to be more positive on Facebook because it is their real identity. The downside is people click out of Facebook less than they do Twitter. Twitter is more like Google in that someone finds something interesting and clicks off to get more. Facebook keeps people on for a long time.

So there are pros and cons to both but from my experience a “fan” of your Facebook page is worth more than a twitter follower, at least today. You should have both but if you need to pour money into one, my bet is on Facebook.