Ted Rubin advises (on Mashable) to not unfollow on Twitter those who rarely tweet. The 40% of Twitter’s user base who haven’t tweeted in the last month are an important part of your audience. Or that’s what I derived out of Ted’s post (http://on.mash.to/OgsekM).

Ted has a point. That they aren’t participating in the conversation doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading others’ tweets for news and info. They are onto the info that interests them the most.

Twitter is Where You Engage

Facebook is a slightly different story. You could unfriend someone who isn’t participating in any exchange of words or other content. Usually though, you have people overparticipating on Facebook. There, the content you share doesn’t have to be a sentence or even words. You could just upload photographs of family or friends and make any inane comment that’s not even grammatically correct.

Twitter focuses on words. Characters, to be more precise. And only 140 of them at a time. That makes writing quality tweets a challenge. Well, quality anything is always a challenge to create. If you are tweeting something like an observation or more, you’ll need perfect grammar. Info tweets do not require much grammar, you could just tweet the name, timings, and venue of a local event, for example.

But Twitter is about engagement as well. With well over 100 million active users on Twitter, you cannot not engage. This is very interesting homework for any marketer worth his or her own salt. Know thy platform. That, above all else, is key to the kind and quality of your engagement. And you also need to know your platform because in some important ways the platform is the audience.

From the business perspective, how I would differentiate between Twitter and Facebook is encapsulated in the table below. This is by no means a definitive appraisal; it’s more likely to carry an informal personal bias, though I’ve kept it as impersonal as possible:

But add your own to it. What particular quirks of the two platforms have you noticed?

Boy, am I glad to write this post, because in-depth analysis of these tools of trade is critical to online business strategy and peace of mind. Thanks Ted!

Send in your views and let’s have a discussion.

Cheers!