Twitter vs Facebook

 

I have had a twitter account for about four years now, but was not active on it until recently. I couldn’t even remember my password! Someone asked me what the point of twitter was and it go time thinking what the true difference between Facebook and twitter are. While they are both social media outlets and can get information to people in a timely fashion, twitter is more personal and accessible, in my opinion. Here’s why:

1. You don’t have to be friends with anyone. When you follow someone on twitter (the equivalent to ‘friending’ someone on FB), all of their tweets and retweets are shown in your Twitter homepage (equivalent to FB news feed). The big difference is that people don’t have to follow you back. I could follow 1,000 people and not of them has to reciprocate. Nice! People can make their accounts private so they can’t be ‘retweeted’, but you still see their every thought. But don’t be offended if someone doesn’t follow you back
2. Twitter doesn’t hide some of your friends.One of my biggest pet peeves with FB is that they filer whose status updates you see. If you don’t have a certain amount of interaction with someone you will never know that they just had a baby or just cleaned up dog poop in their living room. On Twitter, if you follow them, you will see it. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

3. Twitter doesn’t have all the fluff.While each Twitter account has a profile for the tweeter, it is not as in-depth as FB. It is short sweet and to the point of what the person is interested in. while pictures can be tweeted and retweeted, there are no major photo albums of 546 photos from a two-year-old’s birthday party.

4. Tweets are more cryptic. Twitter only allows you 140 characters so really you have to get to the point and hope the people you are directing it towards can figure it out. This is awesome because if something is to lengthy on twitter then chances are I will skip over it to the next. If I want to read stories I will go to FB or People.com. Tweets are typically hilarious one-liners or links to full stories.

I do have a FB account and I check it multiple times per day as I do with Twitter. Most of my FB friends aren’t on Twitter so I have to close the gap on our social interaction. Which social medial outlet are you partial to?