Done right, a good Facebook page can supplement the offline community well. I run the Facebook page for the North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre (www.facebook.com/NRACT). With it, I can easily post audition notices, upcoming shows and events, volunteer calls, and much more in one central place where theater goers can see who else is going that their friends are going too. It builds and solidifies the community that already exists offline . While Twitter gives me good feedback and might be better for a bigger theater, Facebook has given me a lot of bang for my buck in this instance.

I can’t even begin to conceive of how to START a marketing campagin on Facebook unless you’re already an established brand. However, I’m already well entrenched into my target network after only a month on Twitter, well before my company will even officially be public. I see a very good reason for the discrepancy: I don’t become a fan of pages simply because my friends do, and I hardly ever see people recommending that their friends become fans of pages. However, on Twitter, people actively recommend products and persons to their followers, and the nature of a real-time network makes people more likely to explore these recommendations on the fly. Facebook prompts slow, static discussions that people might file away to participate in later and then forget. On Twitter, if you wait 10 minutes, you might miss the whole discussion.

I’ve also noticed that companies who actively engage on Facebook do so in clumps, like responding to comments on a blog; there’s no active discussion, rather just responses to several different posts at once. Often times, they won’t even check in for a second response. On Twitter, the companies who engage their followers do so in real-time. They’ll cover multiple discussions at once, invite new users into the conversation, and generally bring more to the table in terms of content and relevance.

As far as my strategy is concerned, it’s Twitter all the way. I’ll create a Facebook page, of course (it would be foolish not to), and I’ll engage customers as often as possible there, but most of my focus will continue to be on a Twitter campaign.