Paul Jacobson

Twitter-Facebook follower overlap

Twitter newbird blueI use Twitter quite a bit and its a very handy channel for me for various reasons. I publish tweets with links to blog posts to my Twitter stream automatically and it leads to a decent amount of traffic to my site, relatively speaking. I recently set up a Facebook Page to use as my general Facebook presence and uptake has been pretty slow.

I was thinking about this earlier and I started wondering how much overlap there is between my Twitter followers, blog readers and potential Facebook Page fans? If there is a high degree of overlap between the Facebook Page fans and other types of subscribers or followers, that could explain why the Page’s uptake has been slow, at least in part. If you are already following me on Twitter, you probably don’t need a second, duplicate channel.

My one challenge with my Page is that I am not very clear about what its purpose is. There is a lot of noise on the social Web these days and without some sort of differentiating value, my Page becomes one of a couple mildly compelling (at best) content streams.

I like the idea of a Facebook Page as an option for people who want to connect on Facebook but who I wouldn’t friend on Facebook (I am fairly specific, these days, about who I friend on Facebook – I regard it as a personal friends-family space). The Page is business focused for me and the big question I face now is how to make the Page more useful and perhaps even compelling?

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  1. Darren Gorton avatar
    Darren Gorton

    Hi Paul. You made a tough call on the facebook thing, one I totally respect. Thinking about this a bit lately in terms of how to make the best of my own facebook profile, I wonder if using the friends lists more effectively would work [eg limiting family/friend only posts to that list, while allowing the other posts to everybody or to the ‘online friends’ list – as I understand, that list would only then see the ‘business’ posts on your own profile]. Haven’t tried this yet myself but perhaps it might alleviate the hassles of managing yet another ‘profile’ via the page?

    Reply
    1. pauljacobson avatar
      pauljacobson

      Hi Darren

      I did that for a while and maintained lists for my Facebook friends but I found it didn’t really work for me. I realised I want my FB friends to be real friends and family and to direct casual ans business contacts somewhere else. The thing is, Facebook is a pretty popular platform so a Page made sense.

      Reply

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