Last week I did a major reorganization of my social sites. I had started to add people randomly to all my networks –Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed — and lately I was getting a lot of noise and little return on each one of them.
I decided I had to set some rules.
In my personal analysis, I decided I would segment my communities in three different buckets:
- People I have a close relationship with belong to Facebook. I feel like this is the best use of this site, and a lot of my High School and College friends were there already. So I unfriended all the people from social networks that I don’t have a close relationship with and also most of my persent and past co-workers.
- I cleaned up the people I follow in FriendFeed to only those that constantly write or tag interesting things I could have never discovered by myself.
- I left Twitter to follow the people that have anything interesting to say. I did unfollow a lot of the “I’m having breakfast” type of folks, but did leave a wide spectrum of people from all walks of life, from whom I believe I can learn something from.
Last but not least, I separated Spanish-speaking friends from Twitter and FriendFeed to alternate accounts (@jorescobar and jorescobar), so that I can have a better interaction with them, without the fear of alienating my English-speaking followers. I made sure to notify those folks about this fundamental change.
I now feel like I’m using each platform to a 100% of its intended use. I feel like these are the right ways to use these platforms. Even though Facebook has introduced the “like” feature that FriendFeed has, and will reportedly support a new API status function that will supposedly kill Twitter, I feel like this will never happen. Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter are very different social tools.
I asked my followers on Twitter and FriendFeed about how they use these platforms, and I got some insightful responses:
“Facebook for surface interactions; two twitter accounts – one for social media stuff and one for real friend (+ companies that have deals); LJ for purely personal; FF (&Digg, oddly) for keeping my own name on Google search; LinkedIn for business and alumni networking. Those are my major ones” - Janine Southard
“Twitter for .net developer community, Facebook for family and old friends from HS and college. Friendfeed for online friends.” - Alan Le
“I really only use Facebook for keeping in touch with old high school and college friends.” - Seth Greenblatt
“I tend to use them for the same purpose. Both are a mix of business, friends, and family – but they’re just different audiences.” - Tami Baribeau
“I use FriendFeed mainly and then use Twitter as FriendFeed’s messaging addon. ;-)” - Kol Tregaskes
“Facebook is for keeping in touch with people i know and have met…Twitter is my replacement: RSS reader, Yahoo Answers and it allows me to be involved with people/conversation i don’t have the pleasure of always meeting face-to-face” - Andrew David Blair
And you, how do you use each of these and other social tools?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great Post. I touched on much of this in my guest post on TwiTip.com last week, “To Follow or Not to Follow, that is the Question” (http://www.twitip.com/to-follow-or-not-to-follow/). In my post, I introduced my Following Policy and spoke about how people are recognizing that each of the social networking sites serve different audiences in different ways. Glad to see the overall concept spreading. Keep up the great work!
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Hi Jorge! Thank you for all of the great insight. I plan to make some changes this weekend.
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Thanks for the linklove!
My philosophy is closest to Tami’s quote above — all 3 are a mix of business, friends and family and since I don’t feel a strong need to segregate the various parts of my life too heavily it tends to work for me. Occasionally I am delighted by conversations and interminglings happening on my networks between folks who might otherwise never have crossed paths — a former business colleague gets into a discussion with an old friend from high school about something I posted on Facebook, for example. As a fan of serendipity and unexpectedness, I often enjoy those interactions between people who might not have had that same opportunity to connect in the f2f world.
I also enjoy seeing TweetDeck messages go by in very much random topical order — but then, I am someone who has literally had iTunes on random play constantly for about 5 years. ;) If and when needed, Facebook, FriendFeed and TweetDeck allow me to sort contacts into groups so I can follow specific buckets whenever I wish.
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