Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn: Syndication and Respecting Social Network Cultures

Or: How to NOT Alienate Your Friends and Contacts

I saw today that Twitter is releasing a new service/app that provides another level of integration with competing-yet-complimentary social networks. The articles tout the ability to cross-post (aka, “syndicate”) from Twitter to both Facebook and LinkedIn.  For those of us using all three services daily, we know that’s been around awhile. Nothing new there.

The real treat is that now Twitter will allow you to quickly find and follow your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn that also have Twitter accounts.

I actually found this by accident on LinkedIn the other day and it’s quite awesome.  I tried last night to attach to Facebook with no success due to technical issues on Facebook’s side. The latest update says Facebook has blocked the application.

But with great power comes great responsibility

I’ve seen it happen, and I think we need to get the word out.  It seems to me that social media/networking experts, small business and techies are likely the only people really using all three networks.  Most other people are primarily using one or two and have little knowledge of the third.  For example, the stay-at-home mom talking about her soaps knows about Twitter and Facebook with no understanding of LinkedIn.  The CIO of a Fortune 1000 company is on LinkedIn for business, Facebook for personal (maybe) but has not felt compelled to learn much about Twitter.

In the end, I think these new features are going to cause significant alienation if care isn’t taken to understand the respective ‘culture’ of each social network.

So, for those using, or planning to use, these features and cross-post from Twitter to Facebook or LinkedIn, here is some info you might find helpful.

Twitter

To be blunt about it, Twitter is a narcissistic social media platform where everyone blasts their information into the ether to be picked up by anyone and everyone who is listening.  To listen, just go to their profile page and read their posts.  If you kinda’ like them and would like a shortcut, create a list, add them to it and periodically take a look at that list to read through the latest updates.  If you really want to see everything they have to say when they say it, you can “follow” them. This effectively puts their broadcasts into your inbound stream.

There isn’t really a single ‘culture’ on Twitter.  People talk about all sorts of things. Some people tweet a message less than once a week, and others tweet more than 50 messages per day.  Some people just tweet motivational quotes, others just re-tweet those people and some people actually reply to posts and try to interact on a more personal level. The cool thing about Twitter is that anything goes and there are no real rules.

It’s common for Twitter users to follow hundreds, if not thousands, of other users.  This can be overwhelming to new users as Twitter lacks any built-in filtering or prioritizing functionality beyond the ‘list’ feature.  It’s also common for individuals to duplicate their own posts throughout the day or week, as it’s understood that most people aren’t going to read every post in their stream since their last sign-on.

Facebook

I probably don’t have to say much about Facebook.  It’s different than Twitter in that, while you could potentially broadcast to the world, most people I know connect with others they actually know, either friend, family or business contacts.  Additionally, businesses are establishing a presence on Facebook to interact with customers, but that’s a different animal.

From an individual’s perspective, the big difference between Facebook and Twitter is that Facebook is locked down just a bit more, which gives people a more personal experience when interacting with their ‘friends’.  And since Facebook ‘friends’ tend to have some relationship outside of Facebook, most shy away from alienating each other with 50 posts per day advertising their small business or forwarding tons of work-related links. Instead, posts often tend to be more of a personal nature compared to Twitter. For most people, it’s a great platform to connect, reconnect and stay connected with friends, family members and colleagues.

It also seems that Facebook recognized the lack of filtering issues with Twitter and incorporated a solution into their newsfeed interface. Though many people don’t like it and they see it as Facebook determining what news is important, it works well for those with a lot of friends by highlighting more popular items and filtering the rest.

LinkedIn

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s a social network, but with a culture completely different than that of Twitter and Facebook.  While there are always exceptions, LinkedIn is for professional networking, making business-related connections and building professional relationships.  While “open networkers” violate the rule, the premise behind what makes LinkedIn valuable is that you actually have a solid business relationship with each of your connections such that you can and are willing to make referrals, offer recommendations and connect others.

It’s been my impression and experience that people are not using LinkedIn to find out about movie reviews, local bands, discuss politics, religion or share recipes.  People on LinkedIn are there to build relationships, grow their business or advance their careers.

For a while now, LinkedIn has had a ‘status update’ feature that allows users to post a short message.  It used to ask “What are you working on?”, prompting users to stick to business, work, career-related topics.  Today, the homepage, by default, shows the last three updates in your network. You can then click the “more” link to see the latest 8-10 or so.

So What About the Cross-Posting, Already…

Yeah. With Twitters ability to cross-post, the potential to alienate your friends and business contacts is a very real one. On Twitter, people follow and unfollow others for a myriad of reasons and the advice to individuals is to not take it personally when someone stops following you. However, for most people, our Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts are too valuable and we want to encourage relationships, not drive people away.

In terms of post quantity vs quality, I think of it like this:

• Twitter: High Quantity / Quality varies and no one cares
• Facebook: Medium Quantity / Quality will vary, appropriate to your specific audience/friends
• LinkedIn: Low Quantity / High Quality to project the best professional image of yourself and your company

Strategically, it boils down to:

• Twitter: Use it for self-promotion, but, since it’s 100% public, make sure you are filtering your own posts and not getting too personal. Provide information that’s helpful and relevant to your target audience.
• Facebook: Keep in touch with friends and family, but keep in mind that you probably have business contacts too.  Use FB’s new privacy features to filter overly-personal or risqué updates to only the people you really want to see it.
• LinkedIn: Use the status updates feature sparingly to establish yourself as an expert in your field, a professional, and to stay “BOB & TOM” (“Best of Breed” and “Top of Mind”).  Since your connections only see the last 8-10 updates from all their contacts, too many irrelevant updates from one individual fills this up quickly and, as a result, quickly becomes annoying.

Solutions?

Fortunately, both there are solutions available for both Facebook and LinkedIn to help the situation and make syndicating tweets more appropriate to these other network cultures.

For Facebook, check out Selective Tweets.  It connects Facebook and Twitter accounts and allows you to cross-post, but further allows you to filter what you tweet.  You can end your tweets with the #fb hashtag and ONLY those tweets will show up on Facebook.

LinkedIn’s Twitter app has similar functionality. Once installed, go to the Settings tab and enable the selective tweets option.  Use the #in hashtag when you want a tweet to also appear on your LinkedIn status.

Using these features allows you to tweet all you want, and selectively cross-post/syndicate only the relevant tweets to the appropriate network.    Hence, it prevents you from flooding your Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections with all of your irrelevant tweets so you don’t violate the network’s established culture and risk alienating your friends and professional connections.