Facebook and Twitter: Facts, Features, and Marketing Strategies

Posted on Sep 28, 2025 in Marketing

Facebook: Key Facts and History

Foundation Date: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004
Headquarters: Menlo Park, California
Founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz
Employees (March 2013): 4,900
Users (March 2013): 1.11 billion
Available: Multilingual (70 languages)

History

In February 2004, five students from Harvard University created the first Facebook platform as a way to connect with other students. The project became so popular that in a couple of months it spread to other universities. The initial idea started as a joke with a program that Zuckerberg created called FACEMASH (it attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in four hours!). Zuckerberg was accused of violating individual privacy and faced expulsion. But this experiment was the first step toward a bigger project: FACEBOOK.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Facebook users click on advertisements an average of 400 clicks for every one million pages (0.04%). On the other hand, Google’s CTR is about 80,000 clicks for every one million searches (8%). While Facebook’s CTR is not as high, it is still profitable for companies.

User Profiles and Features

Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal details. Users can communicate with others through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create groups, join interest groups, and ‘like pages’.

  • Facebook created a “third gender” option for users who do not wish to specify their gender as male or female.
  • The brand’s color is blue because Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind.
  • More than 425 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices.

Business Pages vs. Personal Profiles

Businesses and groups have a separate option for promotion on Facebook. Main differences with a personal profile:

  • You get likes, not friends.
  • People following you can see your posts, but you cannot see theirs.
  • There must be an administrator of the page with a profile on Facebook.
  • You can promote the page or posts through segmented advertisements.
  • You can create an event.
  • You can invite your friends to like the page.
  • You have a service of analytics tracking your page performance.

News Feed and Photo Application

The News Feed was created in September 2006. It appears on every user’s homepage and highlights information (profile changes, upcoming events, birthdays, etc.).

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos (limit 200 photos per album). These albums can be private so only allowed users can see them. Photos can be tagged; people tagged receive a notification and a link to see the photo.

Privacy Settings

You can choose your own privacy settings in the menu, allowing you to limit which information you want to be published.

Controversies and Criticism

Facebook has met with controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries, including China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Bangladesh, on the basis of containing religious discrimination, anti-Islamic messages, and political content. It is currently under suspicion of giving user information to the Secret Services of the Governments in the USA and Europe.

Societal and Political Impacts

  • Media Impact: Facebook is changing the way traditional media works. Television, radio, and newspapers are getting closer day by day to Facebook opinions and trends.
  • Social Impact: Relations between people are changing. Facebook is a new way to communicate with friends and relatives, no matter how far they are.
  • Political Impact: It allows politicians and campaign organizers to understand the interests and demographics of their Facebook fanbases, helping them better target their voters.

10 Rules for Effective Facebook Advertising

These rules optimize the overall Facebook advertising experience:

  1. Facebook Is Least Effective At Direct Sales.
  2. Create A Greater Volume Of Ads That Target Fewer People.
  3. Friend Users Before You Sell To Them.
  4. Understand Your Market.
  5. Set Advertising Budgets With A Goal In Mind.
  6. Monitor Your Ad Performance And Adjust Accordingly.
  7. Test Landing Pages Versus Facebook Pages.
  8. Split Test Ads By Demographic.
  9. Develop Creative Ad Copy.
  10. Don’t Over Target.

10 Social Media Mistakes Hurting Your Brand

  1. Giving the wrong people access.
  2. Getting Hacked.
  3. Getting Too Personal.
  4. Not Creating Original Content.
  5. Hashtag Highjacking.
  6. Paying for Fake Fans and Likes.
  7. Using Every Platform for the Sake of Using Them All.
  8. Spamming Your Followers.
  9. Not Using Management Tools.
  10. Not Tracking Activity With Website Traffic, Goals, and ROI.

Key Marketing Strategies

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM)

WOM includes buzz, blog, viral, grassroots, brand advocates, cause influencers, and social media marketing.

Marketing Buzz

It is the interaction of consumers and users of a product or service which serves to amplify the original marketing message. Positive buzz is always the main goal of viral marketing and public relations. Buzz marketing is implemented mainly in Social Media (Facebook and Twitter).

Viral Marketing

The main goal is increasing brand recognition through self-replicating viral processes (it is called viral because it spreads like a virus on the net). Anything can be viral (a comment, a photo, a video, a song, a meme, an email, etc.). Users are the ones who make it viral. A large platform must be used (Facebook, YouTube, etc.). The content must be of good quality and different from everything people had seen before. Creativity is needed, or just an unusual situation—something that encourages people to share the content with their friends and family.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing was an advertisement strategy designed for small businesses to promote their products or services in an unconventional way with little budget to spend. This involves high energy and imagination, focusing on grasping the attention of the public on a more personal and memorable level. Some large companies use unconventional advertisement techniques, proclaiming to be guerrilla marketing, but those companies will have larger budgets and the brand is already visible. The main point of guerrilla marketing is that the activities are done exclusively on the streets or other public places, such as shopping centers, parks, or beaches, with maximum people access so as to attract a large audience.

6 Tips to Generate Word of Mouth Buzz

  1. Promote Word of Mouth by Providing Above Average Service.
  2. Connect With Industry Influencers.
  3. Create a Core Group of Insiders.
  4. Incentivize Word of Mouth to Get People Talking.
  5. Use Social Media to Create Personal Connections.
  6. Publish Quality Content.

Essential Twitter Follower Tips

A collection of tips for growing your Twitter following:

  • Upload a Real Photo of Yourself.
  • Reply to Tweets Publicly.
  • Follow Experts in Your Niche.
  • Include Your Location.
  • Use the Twitter Search Tool.
  • Share Quality Content.
  • Write Killer Headlines.
  • Do Not Auto-Follow People.
  • Ask a Question.
  • Follow Back Your Best Followers.
  • Reply as Fast as You Can.
  • Link to Your Twitter Name in Your Email Signature.
  • Tell People They Should Follow You On Twitter.
  • Tweet Awesome Content.
  • Ask Your Followers to Retweet You.
  • Use #Hashtags in Some of Your Tweets.
  • Block and Report Spammers.
  • Unfollow People Who Don’t Follow You.
  • Tweet During Peak Times.
  • Participate in Trending Topics.
  • Follow Highly Relevant People.
  • Tweet Often.
  • Run a Contest.
  • Use Twitter in Your Blog Comments.
  • Install a Twitter Widget into Your Website.
  • Advertise Vacancies.
  • Do Podcasts.
  • Host a Webinar.
  • Put Your Twitter Name on Your Business Card.

Twitter: Definition, History, and Usage

Definition and History

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as Tweets.

It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, and the social networking site was launched by July. By 2012, they had 500 million users, generating 340 million tweets daily. Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the internet. It has been described as “the SMS of the internet.” Tweets can be posted through the website, SMS, or mobile devices.

Twitter’s origins lie in a “daylong brainstorming session” between some students at New York University. The name Twitter reminds one of the chirps of birds, suggesting a short burst of information. The company experienced rapid growth.

  • A record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the football match between Japan and Cameroon.
  • When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Twitter servers crashed.
  • The current record was set on January 1, 2013, in Japan as the new year began.

Functionality and Content Breakdown

Tweets are visible to everyone by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can subscribe to other users’ tweets (known as following). Subscribers are known as Followers or Tweeps (Twitter + peeps). Users can block those who have followed them. The first principle of Twitter is following.

Content Breakdown:

  • News: 3.6%
  • Spam: 3.8%
  • Self-promotion: 5.9%
  • Pointless babble: 40.1%
  • Conversational: 37.6%
  • Pass-along value: 8.7%

Format

Users can group together by topic or type by use of Hashtags. Similarly, the @ sign followed by the username is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To repost a message from another user and share it, you can Retweet (RT).