Twitter and Facebook for business networking

In recent weeks and months, I’ve been writing a lot about Twitter and Facebook. And for good reason. Social media is the hottest trend in the ICT world and I’ve always tried to keep abreast – and keep you, the reader, abreast – of the latest tech developments.

Much has been made about the rivalry between Twitter and Facebook, which is a bit odd given that they are two very different animals. Granted, there are some areas of overlap – both allow you to keep track of what your “friends” are doing – but they are more different than they are similar.

But, since both are social media entities, I guess it’s only natural to compare the two. I do use both but for different purposes – not necessarily by design. It’s just the way things evolved naturally.

My Facebook network which currently stands at 103 “friends” (no, I’m not a collector of Facebook friends) consists primarily of people I already know and have met in person. Of that lot, 15 are people whom I’ve never met before. And of those 15, five are people who follow my writings and occasionally send me comments. Only one person is someone I’ve never met or communicated with yet but whom I want to do some business networking with.

In contrast, my Twitter network currently consists of 106 “followers” (again, I’m not a collector of followers). Of these, 94 are people whom I’ve never met before but for some reason wish to follow my “tweets”. The reason I accept them into my network is that I find their profiles interesting. Most of them are involved in ICT in some way or another.

So, as you can, the composition of my Facebook network is very different from that of my Twitter network. In essence, Facebook is more for social networking while Twitter if for industry or business networking.

Whenever someone asks to follow me (yes, I do keep my Twitter feeds locked as I want to have a measure of control over who can see my postings), I will usually check out their profiles. If they seem interesting, I would add them. If they leave their profiles blank or if they are the kind of “follower collector” who follows 50,000 people (and in turn expect those 50,000 to follow them), I reject them straight away.

Once they are in my network, I will send them a direct message asking whether we’ve met before or whether we have some common friends. That’s usually a good enough ice-breaker for me to get to know these people.

If someone doesn’t reply, I will eventually delete them. What’s the point of having someone in your network if there’s no networking to be done?

Most of the time, they do respond and that’s how I get to know them. Most of them have blogs and if they are interesting, I will include them in my blog roll. In time, I plan to meet them in person.

So, it would seem, for me anyway, that Twitter is the more useful tool for business networking and getting to know new people.

But someone pointed out something interesting to me. The way Twitter works is that you can’t directly message someone unless they are following you. So, if you are not someone whom a lot of people want to follow, you can’t really do much social networking via Twitter. I guess the solution to that is to start a good old fashioned blog and to develop a following.

Another way of course is to start off by following a bunch of people you want to network with and hope that they follow you in return. If they do so, then you can directly message them. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

Facebook doesn’t work that way. In Facebook, you can directly message someone even if that person is not in your Facebook network. What you can’t do is read their profiles (which you can do with Twitter). So, both are kind of different in some ways.

Someone else asked me which of the two, Twitter or Facebook, has more potential for business networking. Although Twitter is better for me now, I do believe that in the long run it will be Facebook that will reign supreme simply because there’s more you can do with Facebook. You can interact in many more ways than you can with Twitter. You can share far more many things. There’s even instant messaging incorporated into Facebook’s interface.

Twitter’s appeal is its simplicity – character limits of 140 and instant, real-time updates. But there are far too many limitations and once you’ve gotten to know someone you will either take it offline (meet in person) or you will further the communication via e-mail, instant messaging or phone call.