I currently have accounts with both. Also with identica, Tumblr and Type Pad.
Twitter is the one I use most. The Twitter updates also feed through automatically to my wall on Facebook.
Let’s take a look at the differences between Twitter and Facebook, bearing in mind this is my private view and each person will be different.
I find that Twitter is more professional than personal. More than half of my contacts are people who work in the media and public relations.
For that reason, I’m fairly self conscious about my updates, knowing they will be read by my peers and potentially a public audience, rather than close friends.
I tend to focus on writing tweets related to my work or current news, injecting humor when appropriate.
These posts also go through to my Facebook wall, where my readership is entirely different.
Most of my Facebook friends are relatives and friends, many from places far away where I used to work.
They’re more likely to comment on my updates than Twitter followers and I make an effort to read theirs.
Dare I say it, Facebook is more popular with young people. Two of my children have Facebook accounts and most of my staff are on there too, but none of them show any interest in Twitter.
When it comes to following people and being followed, I’m happy to link up with anyone on Twitter I find interesting. With Facebook, I just allow people I know.
Because I’m careful about what I publish on Twitter, I sometimes make more casual posts on other sites, either my own blog or a new Type Pad microblog.
I’ve stopped using Tumblr, I just found it not very social and it delivered poor search results on Google.
So in effect, I’ve created boundaries around which web services I use for what purpose. The boundaries aren’t solid walls and can be moved, but in general terms they provide a consistent point of reference.
I also use a lifestream aggregator on my personal blog to bring together most of my content, a sort of personal Friend Feed.
If you have both Twitter and Facebook accounts, how do you differentiate between them?
I have Twitter and Facebook accounts. I very rarely go to Twitter anymore. I much prefer Facebook. I feel with Twitter people are pretty much talking to themselves. I feel people are shouting out various things, and sometimes it seems like no one is really listening to each other. Then when you do get a conversation, I find it hard to follow. I would read people’s updates, and I felt it was tedious trying to find what they had been responding to.
I like Facebook because it seems to have a more community atmosphere. I especially like it now…where you can respond to people’s updates. I love the conversations that take place.
I fully agree with what you say on Twitter vs Facebook in this post. If I’d been forced to choose, I’d go for Twitter, but, perhaps ironically, I find that Twitter has caused me to spend more time on Facebook as well. In the beginning I never took much to FB, but because it’s part of my job to keep track of what’s happening on the social web I try to be present in the key networks and try out as many sites as I can.
But the more time I spend on Twitter the more I find that it’s nice to have a place I can say things I can’t say on Twitter or any of my blogs. There are certainly limits to what I’d post to Facebook too, but it feels at least semi-private – I’m more personal on Facebook than on other sites, partly due to having more personal acquiantances there.
Like you, broadly speaking, I have my professional contacts on Twitter and my personal ones on Facebook. It’s not 100% precise though because many of my professional contacts are also friends – I wouldn’t follow my sister on Twitter, but I’d certainly follow a lot of my friends who’re working in related areas of business – and I do have friends on Facebook I know through my work, and even a few whom I’ve never met. I’d never add someone I don’t “know” as a friend on Facebook, but “knowing” someone has changed with the social web.
There are plenty of bloggers I’ve never met but still feel I “know”, usually because we’ve read each others blogs for some time, whereas if a blogger I had no real sense of who was would add me as a Facebook friend then def. no. It’s both strange and wonderful how this business of who you know and don’t know has been altered by the web.
Recently two high-profile Scandinavian bloggers have died, one in a car accident and another from the cancer she blogged about. The reactions to those deaths are quite something, I certainly felt very sad about the news, and with the young Norwegian blogger who died of cancer the country’s media has covered it like she was a celebrity – at least someone a large part of the nation had a relationdship to. Apart from the tragedy in these to events, the reactions they’ve spurred are truly fascinating….