I am by no means representative of the global sample (simply because where I live right now, Twitter has not been adopted as widely as Facebook has been) but I think there is a fundamental difference between how I use Twitter vs. Facebook. First of all, Twitter (by the sheer way it operates) lets people I don’t know ‘follow me’ and learn stuff about me. In parallel, I can follow people on Twitter I know nothing about in real life (and learn from them). On Facebook, I never let anyone who doesn’t know me well enough (or I don’t have personal benefit from) be ‘friends’ with me. On Twitter, I don’t block anyone from receiving my updates (nor has anyone blocked me yet from receiving theirs). So to me (and again, I’m not representative of the global sample), Twitter is more about trying to get to know people I know little about but am interested in (be it social media leaders, authorities in education or just people I find fascinating), while Facebook is about keeping in touch with those I know a bit (or a lot) about and leveraging these connections in my life.
How about you? How do those you follow on Twitter and your Facebook friends compare?
Exactly.
I found Twitter thru political blogs and quickly found myself in the middle of a thick flock. In fact, I just today de-linked Facebook from that Twitter account. I had set up a 2nd Twitter to tweet on other topics, too.
Still, FaceBook is first-person friends & family. Twitter tweets the whole world round.
@JC: how do your FB friends overlap with those you follow on Twitter? I have less than 1% overlap (mostly because, as I said, twitter is not yet popular locally). Most of the people I keep in touch with on FB either haven’t found out about twitter yet or they know about it but don’t see a point in using it. On twitter, I get to follow (and learn from) people I don’t know enough to become friends with in other channels. What do you get from twitter that you don’t get from Facebook?
[...] last post made me think about the way I may have a severe split personality syndrome online. I’ll [...]
This guy says it better than I can:
Different Communication Styles for Different Social Settings
http://www.twitip.com/twitter-versus-facebook/
I’ve noticed that my IRL friends notice timestamps on FaceBook. There’s more stickiness there.
Twitter is more like radio. If you have more than two dozen follows, it’s not terribly practical to read every tweet. I’m following close to 200 @JohnShepard, most on a political list, and this AM I had 25 pages backlog. My boss is a nice guy, but he ain’t paying for my hobbies!
I’ll have to run the numbers on FB. I have only 2 FB “friends” on my smaller apolitical Twitter @JCShepard. One I’ve never met, followed from last.fm social music site. Other I volunteered with in radio–she is also on MySpace, but we interact much more on Twitter.