You’ve probably already noticed this, but new features from Twitter and Facebook have come nearly tit for tat over the past few weeks. Twitter announced its intention to consolidate product offerings across platforms; Facebook, in turn, announced that it will plant its seeds all over the web and become an even more integral aspect of the link economy.

The arms race that has begun to heat up between these social networks means that marketers need to constantly pressure test their strategy as new features emerge.

Here are the basics of what you should know:

1) Facebook’s move to “colonize” the web gives your customers an opportunity to engage on a deeper level with your brand, but changes to the way profiles work could dilute your presence.

Facebook’s introduction of its global “Like” button is a great thing for brands. Do you have a stand-alone site for a product or service you offer?  Slap a “Like” button on the page and watch your Facebook engagement (and your traffic) soar.

On the other hand, the shift to socialize user interests to wiki-like “Community Pages” may dilute your brand. If you have a Facebook presence, you’ll remain in control of your “Fan” page. If you don’t have a Facebook presence, links from a user’s profile that reference your brand will point to a Community Page that is beyond your control (i.e., Facebook could be hosting content that looks and feels official, but is actually user-generated). This may be a reason to discount MLC guidance (in this one instance!) of avoiding bright, shiny object syndrome.  But only to get a nominal presence in place on Facebook.  We still believe it is best practice to step back and consider audience needs and strategic opportunity before leaping at shiny social objects.

2) Twitter’s moves toward simplicity and user-friendliness mean more casual social media users will find their way onto the service.

Twitter’s ecosystem has been a burden to people unfamiliar with the service. Learning the lingo (retweets, hashtags) and associated products (TweetDeck, Summize, CoTweet, Tweetie) raises the cost of entry to becoming an active Twitterer, and from Twitter’s perspective, led to quite a bit of brand confusion – one might use the Twitter web interface some days, TweetDeck other days, Tweetie on their iPhone, Twidroid for Android, and Twhirl on their Mac.

Twitter’s moves to release an official client for Android, as well as buying Tweetie (which is the best-in-class Twitter app for the iPhone) is an acknowledgment that they intend to compete with its third-party developers and create a unified, cross-platform experience – which will help to drive mainstream use of the service.

3) The backlash is coming; keep an eye open for the next big thing.

From niche and mainstream corners of the web, it has become clear that not all are happy with the moves each company has made. Twitter earned a lot of animus, especially from the open-source community, when it announced that it would begin to compete with third party developers who had previously made apps using Twitter’s API. The ruthlessness of this move, however justified and smart, hurt Twitter’s image as a fun and quirky startup.

But however angry users got at Twitter, Facebook’s announcement was greeted with much more outrage. Privacy advocates howled that Facebook’s Open Graph API would store all sorts of personal data and make it available to companies, and that Facebook’s opt-out procedures were inadequate or nonexistent. The open-source community decried Facebook’s efforts to become central to the web, arguing that a single company could not be trusted to be such an important part of the internet. The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and even a group of senators publicly complained.

These concerns are far, far from the general userbase, and for most brands, this will barely be a blip on the radar – at least in terms of traffic and engagement. But the kinds of users who do have those concerns tend to be trendsetters and technically-capable – and they might leave en masse for another service. In fact, that may have already begun.

Don’t think it can happen? When’s the last time you signed into Friendster?

Don’t get me wrong – Facebook vs. Twitter isn’t Coke vs. Pepsi. The core offerings here are different enough that I doubt there will be an all-out corporate war. But I would expect the innovation to only accelerate as each social network attempts to become more integral to the rest of the web. As this happens, the landscape will continue to shift – and you’ll need to shift along with it.

MLC Members, browse our Social Media Topic Center – a one-stop resource for our best tools and insights in this area.

Related posts:

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2. Social Media: Moving from Compulsion to Innovation
3. The Social Media Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making
4. Social Media: The Dangers of Discovery
5. Social Media | Is Marketing the “Tip of the Spear” in a Corporate Cultural Revolution?