Facebook is Personal & Twitter is Public

A few weeks ago, I received a message on Facebook from a domain industry friend with an urgent message. Apparently I had befriended a person who was posting Anti-Semitic links on his Facebook page, and my friend wanted to know if I knew the guy and/or if I had seen the links he was posting. The answer to both questions was, “no.”

I receive a number of Facebook “friend” requests each week. I typically look to see if we have friends in common, and if so, I approve the request without anything further. I figured, if you’re a friend of a friend, you can be a friend of mine. I had around 500 Facebook friends, and when I went through the list a few days ago, there were many names I didn’t recognize, let alone consider a personal friend.

I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that I generally use Facebook to keep up with my friends. I was a late adopter and didn’t really use it until a year ago, (although I established my account in grad school), but it has allowed me to keep up with high school friends, college friends, and other random friends I’ve made over the years. Of course, there were also many domain industry friends, too. However, I really don’t do any business or talk about business on Facebook to spare my friends from seeing business updates in their news feeds.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a very public outlet for me to share information. A majority of my posts are business-related, and I don’t post much in the way of personal information. I am not against posting personal things, but my primary Twitter objective is business and marketing. I have a lot of followers, and I follow a whole lot of interesting people. The more information I can get from Twitter, the better.

That said, I’ve decided to draw the line and make Facebook more of a personal spot, only accepting friends and colleagues I know on a personal level. I feel that I share much of what I am doing on my blog anyway, but I wanted to draw the line, and I think Facebook is the place to do it.

If we are no longer connected on Facebook, it’s nothing personal. Connect with me on Twitter instead

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