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Ask HN: Why do celebrities favor Twitter over Facebook?
Twitter has less than 300 million MAU, while Facebook has 1.3 billion MAU. Twitter US MAU is also much smaller than Facebook MAU.
Intuitively, celebrities want to use Facebook to promote themselves.
However, most celebrities are more active in Twitter. This is also true for tech leaders. For instance, most YC partners are pretty active on Twitter but not so on Facebook.
Why do they only target a small audience instead of a much bigger audience?
- colept 12y agoCommunication-wise, Twitter is a better platform for socialites and celebrities to connect with their audience. It's a one-to-many transmission model and one can send and receive as desired. It's model is more flexible and requires less maintenance for those who are busy or on the go.
- biglizheng 12y agoLet's say you are a celebrity on the go, posting something on Facebook has a potential of reaching extra 1 Billion users. Of coz, there are more nosies with an extra billion users. However, you are still reaching more audiance than Twitter ...
- Red_Tarsius 12y agoIMHO In facebook, crazy users and annoying people can share longer rants and have bigger exposure. 140 characters cuts down the noise. Also twitter is already a replica of the star system: leaders and followers.
- biglizheng 12y ago140 actually makes average users hard to understand what does it mean without context information. This is also the reason that Twitter user number stops growing, even slower than the gigantic Facebook.
- sp332 12y agoFacebook does not send all of your updates to all of your followers. For pages with large amounts of followers, only about 10% of your followers will have any given post pushed to their timeline. You can increase the number by paying FB to "promote" individual posts, but Twitter sends everyone everything.
- biglizheng 12y agoFor a commoner like me, FB only notify 10% of my friends. Is that the same thing for celebrities? It doesn't seem so. I just take a sample using Justin Bieber's post that are both shared on FB and Twitter. On FB it has 385k likes, and Twitter only has 63k likes to the same content. The ratio is similar to MAU of the two platforms. FB is able to get more audience for him.
- nfbush 12y agoOn Facebook people interacting with the content by liking and commenting will increase the content's reach by showing it to more people.
- biglizheng 12y agoSo it makes more sense for celebrities to directly broadcast to a larger audience on FB than Twitter...
- Mamacom 12y agoI work in PR, here's my perspective: journalists love Twitter because they can easily share their articles and find interesting news shared by others (much better than Facebook bc you don't depend on a timeline, but rather on public hashtags and trending topics). Because journalists are there, celebrities are there. And because celebrities are there, journalists are there. It's a virtuous cycle. Twitter's also much easier to monitor than Facebook (private pages), so it feeds celebrity egos and the PR/advertising machine at the same time.
- biglizheng 12y agoThis really makes sense. Basically, Twitter is for journalists and celebrities, while Facebook is for commoners. No wonder why Twitter's user growth is pretty limited. The question becomes why it is hard for Facebook to adapt this hashtag and trending model? FB does have public profiles for celebrities.
- junto 12y agoYou have to have a Facebook account to access Facebook content. I can read Twitter content without an account.
- biglizheng 12y agoThis is NOT true. Try log out Facebook, and you will still still be able to read public profiles of celebrities.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- manidoraisamy 12y agoFacebook was created as friends network, while Twitter was created as followers network. Even though facebook added follow feature later, Twitter is still seen by many as followers network that suits celebrities.