Popular social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are continuing to battle it out for ultimate supremacy. Photo courtesy of MarquetteJournal.org.

Trends come and go — from bell bottoms to high-waisted shorts and crop tops. Now we are even seeing the subtle switch in trends from Facebook to Twitter.

I believe Twitter is better than Facebook.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people still use Facebook. It seems to me, however, that Twitter is becoming more and more popular.

Tweets tend to be more casual and used more often. I know for me, Facebook is really only for posting pictures.

I remember the days when everyone posted on Facebook at least once a day, if not more. People posted about trivial things and random thoughts. Now, Twitter has taken that role. Facebook feeds have become mostly pictures and a few posts about important things such as birthday wishes, anniversaries or announcements.

I’ve noticed a decrease of postings on my Facebook feed. I refresh and there are no new postings for hours. I refresh my Twitter feed and there’s about 20 new tweets every time.

I asked a few of my friends to see what their thoughts were. Is Facebook slowly being ousted by Twitter? Or are we just finding different uses for each site?

“I really only use Facebook for pictures,” UND freshman Laramie Johnson said. “I use Twitter on a daily basis, and I don’t post too many pictures on it.”

When I asked a few middle-aged people, the general response was they only used Facebook and didn’t even bother with Twitter. The rest of my friends had responses like, “There’s just so much more going on with Twitter.” or “Twitter is way more entertaining.”

Twitter recently bought out Vine — another social media company. This has definitely upped it’s popularity and given it more credibility because Vine has become a huge success.

However, Facebook also has recently paired up with Instagram, a site that receives a big thumbs up. I guess this makes the battle neck-and-neck as far as publicity and advertisement goes.

The next phase of the battle is privacy. Facebook shares more personal information than Twitter. Since there is a profile about the individual, it automatically allows outsiders more access to that person’s information. Twitter has a basic profile, but it doesn’t ask detailed information like Facebook does. With more and more hype about Internet safety popping up these days, it’s safe to say users are looking for more private sites to socialize on. Facebook says that your profile information will be private — but in the end, is anything really private on the Internet to someone who wants access?

I bet my money on “no.”

Individualism and personality are becoming more important in this day and age. Being able to express yourself is practically a necessity. Everyone wants to follow the trends, but they also want to stand out. This opens the door to all the colors and themes Twitter offers. Facebook only offers the standard white background with blue accents. With Twitter, you can pick a standard background or use Themeleon and create basically anything you want, making Twitter more compatible with a person’s need to be an individual.

Each social media site offers many of the same basic features. Favoriting a tweet is basically the same as “liking” a post. Re-tweeting something is synonymous with sharing a post. You can follow someone and you can become friends with someone. Tagging someone can happen in a post or a tweet as well. In a broad scope of things, it’s hard to see the difference between the two. Minus the in-depth profile and the ability to privately chat with friends, Twitter and Facebook have a lot of similarities. Regardless of these similarities, it seems that Twitter is on the rise and Facebook is slowly being set aside on the back burner.

There are still those who don’t have Twitter — the people who post too many statuses about not feeling well or being bored. These statuses never get “liked” — it’s pretty obvious why. I see these posts as just another tweet. It’s much more fitting for the dynamics of Twitter.

There’s probably a reason that Twitter only allows 140 characters. It’s meant for basic thoughts and stories — short comments which usually don’t have much depth. Facebook posts can be made fairly long, which stands to reason that they should be about more important life events.

Because you can create albums of pictures on Facebook, it just seems that’s the best reason to use the site.

Pictures are honestly the only things I ever post anymore. Since Twitter, I do most of my socializing and posting there. It seems that a lot of others agree with me. Facebook is by no means struggling or will be vanishing any time soon, but it has become less of a priority.

Mary Ochs is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. She can be reached at [email protected].