Seemingly young people prefer Facebook over Twitter, but what implication does that have for social media... or more specifically companies who use social media for marketing?

The American think tank Pew conducted a study in 2009 that outlined young people's preference of Facebook over twitter.

I think it's easy to see why: Twitter allows you to communicate but in a very specific way. It might not be that confusing to you, but to a novice hash tags and @ signs all over the place may seem confusing.

Responses come think and fast and if commenting on a popular trend, then these responses will also likely come from people you've never met and will never talk to again. Interactivity between media types is also lacking on twitter... and I don't mean the legions of tech bloggers and journalists on twitter, but rich media content like pictures, music and full preview YouTube videos.

So onto Facebook which is easy to use, intuitive and restricted to people you know. If you want updates from famous people or bands, like on twitter, well that's built-in to with many Facebook groups and offical fan pages. There is also an ever expanding selection of add-ons in the Facebook application section.

Facebook is the new smart phone of social media, all-singing-all-dancing and Twitter is that Nokia your mum let you buy when you were 12 that had a phonebook, text messages and that snake game.

For companies that currently use twitter as a marketing medium it might look a bit bleak, the functionality of Twitter allows you to use TweetDeck or HootSuite, CoTweet etc. to look at trends and watch out for your brands keywords and respond/monitor. Facebook doesn't let you do this and control of access to user data is a hot topic at the moment with changes to privacy policies etc...

I'm sure that Facebook will realise this and add a trending feature to their set up. However I don't think the kind of free reign currently available on twitter will be replicated. So what does this mean for the companies involved? lots of cash for Facebook when they work out the business model for advertisers and lots of missed marketing opportunities until then.

I've been a member of Twitter in various incarnations for a long time and whilst not the most prolific personal user I do have a fondness for it, but I believe its time has come and gone.

In 5 years time I predict that Twitter will be almost unused... that's unless it diversifies - very possibly at the expense of it main fan base and incorporates a whole host of new features that would make it like Facebook, but then why not just use Facebook?