Konamoxt, Inc.

I often hear people ask “What’s the deal with Twitter? Isn’t that just like the Status feed feature of Facebook? Isn’t it just a feature?” On the surface this may seem to be the case. Twitter’s main purpose and functionality is indeed a micro-blogging feed, much like Facebook’s status feature.

But comparing Twitter to Facebook status because the are both micro-blogging platforms is a little like comparing UPS Trucks to Taxis because they are both automobiles.

Facebook and Twitter are different not because of their features, but because of how people use them. Specifically, they are different because of the differences in how people manage their social networks on Twitter and Facebook. Understanding this difference is critical to your effective use of both as a marketing or professional networking tool. I’ve also talked about how important it is for technology startups to think about how they can leverage these platforms to help virally spread awareness of their product. In order to successfully develop a viral strategy around these platforms, you have to understand how people use them.

The vast majority of Facebook users treat their friends list as a narrowly scoped list of people they know in the “real world”. They are their school friends, their work colleagues, their family members. They have a prior connection with the person in the off-line world, and they’ve extended that connection into the online world. There’s nothing wrong with this use of a social network, in fact many people would argue this is the point behind social networks. But this is very different from how most people use Twitter.

Users of Twitter tend to be much more generous in making connections with people they’ve never met in the “off-line” world. This isn’t to say that the connections made on Twitter aren’t as substantive as those from prior off-line relationships. It’s not lesser or greater, just different. I suspect this difference is primarily due to two distinctions. First of all the “creation myth” of these platforms are very different.

Facebook (as the name implies) was created to emulate the social network of a college yearbook, it was designed around personal connections at school. Twitter was created around the idea of highly wired/connection people who needed to communicate in real time with larger groups of people.

Beyond just the creation myth, these products have slightly different features that make social network growth and expansion operate very differently. One encourages public dialogs and broad reaching nets of friends, while the other makes it easy to find real people you know from the real world.

Twitter for example allows you to have unidirectional follow/following relationships, follow/following lists are public, and by default tweets are either broadcasts or narrowly scoped to an individual recipient, but still presented in the public forum. Facebook on the other hand has tools for quickly finding people by name, location, and association that you’ve already indicated your affiliation with. Facebook has a plethora of features to dial in the scope of a dialog to one, several, or all of your friends.

So what? How does this effect me? It’s important to understand these differences in order to understand how to utilize these platforms. How should this awareness effect product integration? How would it effect using these platforms as broadcast mediums for things like product launches? In upcoming posts I will talk about how these differences can and should inform your strategies for using these platforms. Stay tuned.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 10:21 am under Social Media, Technology
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