It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally reached a conclusion how I want to manage my presence and time on Twitter and Facebook. It looks likes its coming down to the ol’ 80 20 pareto principle.
Twitter (@mtbenson) is becoming the professional hub for my social media presence due to:
1. Focus
2. Relevancy
3. Time Commitment
4. User Permissions
5. User Extensibility
6. Adoption Rate
1. The tool is simple and effective. They have built a system to do one thing; broadcast messages. It does that one thing very well and that enables users to share and discover what’s going on in the world or their neck of the woods “right now”.
2. Twitter is as real-time as it gets. If it’s old news, it gets pushed down really fast. If it’s major, it rises really fast. Trending topics also help make it even more obvious what’s going on. Simple, huh?
3. You can keep Twitter to a minimal time commitment. The feed is easy to scan because the inherent nature of tiny, bite size pieces of information. Even if a message is an utter waste of time, and many are, at least the time sink is a bare minimum with only 140 characters to read.
4. I don’t need permission to read messages from people of value. I’ve developed criteria for who I follow based on glancing at their page which has made things easier. In general what I am looking for is if the person is actively adding value to and extracting value from the community, or spamming it. I look at their bio. They need to have one. It needs to have some keywords in which I am interested. If there is no bio, that’s a yellow flag. If the bio says things like “get rich online, here’s how” that’s a red flag. I look at their following/follower/tweet numbers. If they are following 0, that’s an red flag. If they are following 8,173 people and have 4 followers, that’s a yellow flag since they are probably using a service to automate their list. If they have 10,364 tweets, they’re probably a spammer, so that’s a red flag. Next I look at their tweets. If the entire first page is in the format of copy that sounds like the title of a post and a URL, that’s a red flag. What I want to see are some @’s and some RT’s; those indicate human interaction. All in all, this has made my feed much more informative and reduces the time I need to scan through it.
The inverse is also important. Other people don’t need my permission to read my messages.
This allows me to get to know what other people are thinking in a low-impact, non-invasive manner and vice versa.
5. Users have made the system easier to use through RT, @, $ and # tags. Twitter is now the only individual site search (the only search tool other than Google) I use because of tagging. And that’s saying something.
6. Everyone is there. If they aren’t, they should be. Twitter may be the first to one billion.
For those reasons, Twitter has become the most effective social media tool for my professional life. Unfortunately for them I spend most of my time on their service not on their website, but rather through TweetDeck. Since it’s becoming more of a medium than a destination, how long before others try to paint it a different way? That’s my only concern at the moment for Twitter.
Although Facebook (/mikebenson) still gets more of my time, it has receded from an all-in-one to a personal hub for my social media activity due to its:
1. Bonds
2. Media
3. Auto-biographical nature
4. User Permissions
1. Facebook creates a more personal, intimate environment, which allows users to develop deeper bonds and share a richer experience. There are people that I now have stronger relationships with because of Facebook.
2. It’s easy to consume media within Facebook. I know Twitter can share links, but Facebook gives you a screenshot of the page you’re about to navigate to, so there is a better sense of comfort. You can share and watch videos directly within your stream. And perhaps most importantly, you can share photos, even creating albums. Through these types of media, Facebook does a fantastic job of capturing your life.
3. Through the whole of its feature set, Facebook essentially documents your life in chronological order. Hundreds or even a thousand years down the road (assuming we last that long) society on a macro level and people on a micro level will be less a mystery. No longer will cultural anthropologists or historians have to wonder what a person was thinking at the time they wrote a book, committed a heinous or heroic act, made a discovery, etc (assuming the data persists and is uncorrupted).
4. People do need permission to read my posts and updates. Further more, I can fine tune permissions on a line item level.
80 20
I predict that for the near future…
80% of my social media time will be on Facebook. I will get 80% of my personal value from it, but only 20% professional value. It would be a lot less than 20% professional value if I didn’t have access to valuable opinions on my work among my network of friends and colleagues.
20% of my time will be on Twitter. I will get 80% of my professional value from it, and only 20% personal value.
One Comment
I’ve never heard things put that way before. It certainly gives me something to think about …