The more time I spend on Facebook and Twitter, the easier it is for me to understand the value of both networks separately because of their differences. There is, however, one thing that makes them annoyingly similar- people who update both their Facebook and Twitter at the same time with the same information. I would call this the problem of redundant content, but it isn’t the redundancy that is bothersome. Sometimes there is a message you would like to share with both communities like the birth of a child, the change of a job, or a review of the new restaurant on the corner, but it is the ongoing redundancy of some content by users that requires to make a choice: Friend or Follow?
This question is really about what I see as the differences between Facebook and Twitter. There isn’t a guidebook or set of restrictions that say what you can and cannot do when generating your own content and networks, but I can at least have an opinion. For me, Facebook is about people I actually have a personal connection to because they are the the people who I see on a regular basis, the ones I grew up with, the ones I went to school with, the ones I met at that party last week and had a blast talking to and even the people that I don’t know all that well, but want to get to know better. These are my personal relationships. Twitter, on the other hand, is about people I want to learn from and share information with, but on a more professional level. Am I going to post every piece of interesting digital marketing news on Facebook to bore the crap out of my friends and family? Probably not, unless its about something I specifically contributed to creating or achieving or a big award we won as a company. Will I post all that news on Twitter? Hell yes. Why? Because the people on Twitter are just a network of hubs in the information grid. My Twitter followers care about different things than my Facebook friends, and only sometimes do they overlap. Are there exceptions? Of course. Some of my personal friends only use Twitter and I won’t penalize them for that choice, I just follow them. Does this mean that I won’t friend and follow you? No, it just means that if I do I will have to make a choice when I start seeing double.
Now that I’ve stated my reasoning, I’m off to make some hard choices. It’s my network and I make the rules.
