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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is useless compared to Facebook. You get a lot more engagement from Facebook.

With twitter your window of opportunity is the 5 seconds that you show up in their feed. With Facebook that time is a lot longer.

You can have 10,000 followers on twitter, but only 20 people will see your announcement, since you'll show up in their feed for 5 seconds.

Anyone who follows a business account on Twitter, is most likely following more than 100 people(and most likely >1000), which means you are one of hundreds of people trying to talk to them

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I have repeatedly had exactly the opposite experience: I've gotten hundreds of respondents for surveys, driven traffic to new blog posts, and fully enrolled a class off Twitter posts, and have had Facebook attempts at the same things fizzle. Twitter has been a much more valuable tool for us than Facebook.

Which is fine, because my Facebook list is filled with people I went to high school with, who couldn't give less of a crap about what my company is doing this week.

I just don't get the utility of twitter for business. I see one great use for twitter, which is what I am using it for right now: Get major influencers to follow you. When you do that, you have a good chance to be republished by one of them, which is great PR.

(That's why I bothered writing two articles recently, trying to raise my twitter 'important people' follower count. It actually works somewhat.)

I'll give you an example, I needed to buy some wine as a gift. So I tweeted out to Gary Vaynerchuk what to buy. He tweeted back with a few suggestions. And I got into my car and drove down to Wine Library and bought one of his suggestions.

youre from jersey? respect++

That's why you @reply them.

Not in a spammy manner, of course. But if someone's talking about your business on Twitter, engage them.

I was talking more about announcements.

I do the @reply thing, but it's a little sucky, since that @reply shows up in everyone's feed.

So long as you start the tweet with @[twitteruser], your @reply will only appear in someone's feed if they follow you and also the person you are sending the at-reply to. Or if they are the person you're sending the message to, of course.

that's the point, if my message is only to that one person, why would my followers want to read about it?

To clarify, your @reply won't necessarily appear in everyone's feed. It will only appear if:

1) They are the user you are sending the @reply to, OR 2) They follow you AND the person you send the @reply to.

So for example, if I follow @balsamiq and @fogbugz and @balsamiq sends an @reply to @fogbugz, that message will appear in my feed. But if @balsamiq sends an @reply to a user I do not follow, I will not see it in my feed.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. I think everyone see's your @reply -- perhaps you mean DMs?

jsb is correct; they made this change a few months back.

Extra tidbit: this is the reason for those ". @foo ..." tweets you may be seeing. If any character precedes the @, then the tweet will appear in all your follower's feeds; otherwise, it behave as jsb described.

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