Twitter and Facebook – BFFs 4 Realz

Image courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

I didn’t immediately realize that spending more time with Facebook led to me spending more time with Twitter. I was just moving along, updating my status a little more frequently, tweeting here and there throughout the day, rather accidentally ‘hanging out’ with two newish friends. I didn’t consider that the three of us had a lot in common, that the other two might be forging stronger connections to each other outside of me, or that there really was a ‘three of us’ in a group sense at all. But there was, and there is, and I think I like it.

While there is an inherent value in uniqueness and individuality, a common ground and goal forges a stronger connection, and calls for a certain dependence upon that is the lifeblood of sustainability. Sure, Facebook and Twitter need me and millions of ‘mes’ to stay afloat and matter. But I increasingly need them to stay connected to the degree that I want to. And that’s what will keep them growing.

So how are they similar?

Twitter was roughly introduced to me by a colleague like so: “Ya know Facebook status updates? It’s like that but constant.” This seemed a bit overwhelming and senseless initially. Like many people, it wasn’t until I was knee-deep ‘into’ Twitter that I ‘got it’. But the similarities go beyond that in the way you use it. Much like Facebook’s “People You May Know”, I find many of the people I follow on Twitter through other people I follow. It’s not necessarily people I know, but people I want to know. Or, at the very least, people I want to find out more from.

There is also a shared encouragement of authenticity. Go ahead, use your real name! Tell us where you work! Basically, it is a call to grow up and grow above social sites of yesterday. Sure, there’s still room for favorite books and music, but this is about keeping your life together and organized, keeping in touch, and admitting that just maybe your job takes up more of your time now than video games. It’s a refusal, for sure, to make that growing up the same as your parents’ growing up. However, exploring the ways our generation is different from theirs goes well beyond a blog post about social media.

So how are they different?

Your Facebook page, while ever-evolving, does have a static foundation. It is at the heart of things a page upon which things happen – a neatly-categorized page of information. Some of this will change, some of it will not. Your birthday will likely stay the same, for example, if all goes well. Within this there is a uniformity to Facebook unlike that of even MySpace. While I obviously like that different people’s pages contain different information, I also like that I know where to find that information. The biggest appeal Facebook has for me is that it’s not a horrible mess.

Sure, I might find it lacking customization options if I was ten years younger and had twenty more free hours a week. But as things stand, I like knowing that when I get to a Facebook page I can easily find what I’m looking for – sans bad Nickelback music and fluorescent backgrounds. It has a professionalism about it, whether it’s a business page or personal page. This is not to say that users aren’t conscious of what they have on their page – quite the contrary. It amounts to a stripped-down profile of a person or organization, so in that respect it serves as much as a resume as it does a synopsis of self. But it relies more upon content for value, which as an SEO Specialist I’m kinda trained to love.

So why do we need Twitter if Facebook is so awesome? Twitter is the text message to Facebook’s essay – the scribbled napkin thoughts that build a Facebook. Essentially, Facebook is the black pants and white-button down shirt of our lives. That which we build on more consciously and concretely, with more regard for our overall selves. But there is more to my day than that. If I hear a new song on the radio that I like, I will be infinitely more likely to tweet about it than add it my Facebook page. I may be sick of it next week. It hasn’t warranted addition yet. But it has caught my attention – and Twitter permits me the freedom to share what catches my attention.

And maybe it caught someone else’s attention too, and they know more about the band, like where I can get a free download, or if they are playing somewhere near me soon. They tell me, via Twitter, such information that they likely would have never shared even if this band was buried somewhere in a favorites list on my Facebook page. It’s fast-fast-fast in a way that Facebook can’t be and shouldn’t be. We need those black pants. We need that white button-down shirt. But those pants and shirt need a vibrant accessory that is oh-so in the now – and that is Twitter.