Facebook & Twitter – Never the Twain Shall Meet?

I’ve tried lots of stuff online. LOTS. When a feature is available or a new site appears, I try to give it a shot to see how it works for me and how others might be able to use it. Some worked out great (I’m now obsessed with meticulously cataloguing EVERY picture I take in Flickr – for a guy who never took pictures as a young adult, I’m now into taking as many as I can – using Dracu-Pig keeps me on a schedule about it.); some haven’t (I’m still cleaning up the mess from my dabbling with Twitter Automation & Following Tools – while they have a use for some, they are NOT for me.)

Being the social media gigolo I am, when I learned that my tweets could automatically update my Facebook status, I jumped on it, thinking I had found a major time saving tool. Rather than going back and forth, I would update both with a simple facebook app! HALLELUJAH! What a huge time saver!

Then I realized something that I had overlooked. The language on twitter is VASTLY different from the language of Facebook. All of a sudden my Facebook status updates sported a series of RT’s, @’s and #’s – to the friends I had on Facebook who were NOT twitter savvy (a good amount at the time), my status updates were confusing, annoying and more likely to drive people away from me than to me. I update twitter more frequently than Facebook because if the real-time conversation feel twitter provides – facebook usually leaves me feeling like I just missed someone. I realized that there are times I want both sites to have the same info, but more often times when I wanted to keep them separate. One of the things I talk about with people is that each site has a different culture; what’s appropriate in one place might not be in another, and while Facebook and twitter share a somewhat casual air, I interact a little differently on each – Twitter is more frequent, while on Facebook I update my status more sparsely – I prefer wishing happy birthdays and catching up on my newsfeed. When I want to post a message to both sites, I use the Selective Twitter Status application on Facebook, or take advantage of the multiple account management offered by Tweetdeck.

For me, it just made sense to keep those sites apart unless I felt the need to cross-post. Are you cross-posting everything? I’d love to know what your experiences have been.

Tags: Culture, Facebook, Flickr, On the Web, Online Communities, Social Media, Social network, Twitter