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 }
