Which is more productive? Blogging vs Tweeting

It’s amazing how fast people change their opinions of social media sites.  I can remember back to the summer of 2008 when my business friends of mine dismissed Twitter as a waste of time.  As time goes on the micro-blogging site is only continuing to grow on me, and now the challenge exists in allocated my time and efforts between tweeting and blogging.  The following is a response to questions I field from numerous marketers and attempts to compare the two based on four parameters.

Effort

Many marketers are realizing that tweeting requires more effort than expected, due to the large number of tweets for those with significant followers.  Blogging necessitates effort in a different way, since each post is much longer yet fewer of them exist.  However, allocating your efforts evenly between the two will likely yield more immediate activity and response from your readers on Twitter.

Money

Comparing the monetization is probably a bit pre-mature.  Twitter is still quite new and thus trying to formulate a workable model for monetization.  Blogs’ more established framework lends itself to Google Adsense given a strong and consistent follower base.  Alternatively, Twitter doesn’t give users that capability.  So having a hundreds of thousands of people reading your tweets will not directly pay you anything.  View Twitter as merely an avenue to your money-generating sites online.

Results

Twitter garners more appeal to me as an online marketer, and personally it appeals to my instant gratification propensity in the way it can yield immediate results.  It’s a matter of a mouse-click to get your informative, news-worthy, humorous or bizarre thoughts to the world.  By contrast, a well scripted blog post could take days to attract the same number of eyes.

Time

The irony with Twitter lies in the time consumption users experience.  Unlike blogs, which can require more time in per-post writing, Twitter originally began with the hopes of limiting the time required to communicate with online social circles.   Despite this, Twitter users can decide their degree of involvement regardless of their following site.  Personally I try to limit my own Twitter use to an hour a day, which includes new tweets, responding to messages, and managing my followers/unfollowers.

So which is more productive?  Instead of jumping to hard and fast conclusions, I’d recommend social media junkies to use both and to achieve an inter-connected balance between the two.  The undeniable truth prevails: offering good quality content yields the highest productively.