Robert Scoble on Twitter versus Facebook for Business

Famous in the tech world, Robert Scoble is a technology evangelist. As he has put it himself, he “drinks from the firehose of information” so that he can pass it on to us. Known for commenting on the latest and greatest in complex areas of tech, we are fortunate to have Robert weigh in on the relatively accessible areas of Twitter and Facebook for business.

We would suggest that for most businesses it is appropriate to use both Twitter and Facebook. But it is important to think about what you want to accomplish on each platform. As Robert points out, you should not just be running your Twitter feed through your Facebook Page. Actually, while posting Twitter to your personal profile might be tolerable to your close friends, it is completely inappropriate for your Facebook Business Page. One reason you should not do this is that you should use your Facebook as an opportunity to expound and use visual illustrations. Why limit yourself to 140 characters as you have to on Twitter?

Robert likes Twitter because he loves information rich environments. Robert Scoble is an advocate for and and a generous contributor to information distribution. He has made his photographs public domain and follows over 30,000 people on Twitter. Wikipedia describes Robert as a blogger, noting his popular blog, Scobleizer.com and his high profile work for Microsoft, Fast Company and now Rackspace.

All that information involvement can seem overwhelming to average folk, including some of our readers on Boomer Tech Talk. I thought you might enjoy a song that a gentleman named Scott O’Raw wrote in his attempt to express his own experience of the overwhelming volume of information rushing in on us these days. He calls it the Ballad of Robert Scoble although he carefully explains it is not critical of Robert. It is just that Robert is an example of a prolific information generator.

Understanding the information environment your clients live in helps. How can you participate effectively? How can you as a business use Twitter to build relationships with customers and potential business partners through engagement and information exchange? Where does Facebook fit in? Here are Robert’s ideas.
Filmed by Linda Sherman at South by Southwest Interactive Conference 2010 in Austin

Transcript:
I’m here with Linda Sherman. I just gave a talk on Twitter and one of the questions she asked me to expound on was Twitter versus Facebook for businesses. The way I look at it, each business will be different or each genre of business will be different… like the tech business is very Twitter happy, “Twitter-centric.” And that’s partly because we can mix different brands together or different people and brands together in one stream and that’s really difficult to do on Facebook. Facebook sort of does it by following but it’s not a strict stream the way it is on Twitter.

Twitter is also very information dense because they limit you to 140 characters. So even on a mobile phone I can get a lot of tweets very, very quickly and there’s not a lot of visual noise because of comments, photos, videos and thumbnails and stuff like that.

On the other hand, that’s what makes Facebook more fun for normal people… if you have a birthday party for your kid and you see photos coming through the stream and videos – that makes them very engaging and very interesting for Facebookers. So you have to view Twitter and Facebook as different things with different audiences and different expectations on what you would put in the stream.

If you’re a business, I would look at both and look at doing certain things, certain behaviors on both that are separate. Don’t try to copy your tweets over to Facebook necessarily.

Robert Scoble’s iPhone Apps show his engagement with information and social media

How do you separate the use of Facebook and Twitter in your business? You are invited to show off your Facebook Page and Twitter links.