

Ask HN: Why do celebrities favor Twitter over Facebook? - biglizheng

Twitter has less than 300 million MAU, while Facebook has 1.3 billion MAU. Twitter US MAU is also much smaller than Facebook MAU.<p>Intuitively, celebrities want to use Facebook to promote themselves.<p>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.<p>Why do they only target a small audience instead of a much bigger audience?
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sp332
Facebook 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.

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biglizheng
For 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.

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nfbush
On Facebook people interacting with the content by liking and commenting will
increase the content's reach by showing it to more people.

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biglizheng
So it makes more sense for celebrities to directly broadcast to a larger
audience on FB than Twitter...

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colept
Communication-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.

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biglizheng
Let'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 ...

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Mamacom
I 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.

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biglizheng
This 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.

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junto
You have to have a Facebook account to access Facebook content. I can read
Twitter content without an account.

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biglizheng
This is NOT true. Try log out Facebook, and you will still still be able to
read public profiles of celebrities.

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manidoraisamy
Facebook 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.

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Red_Tarsius
IMHO 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
140 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.

