I was a fairly early adopter of Twitter. I think I opened my original account in 2006, or 2007 at the latest. At the time, it was just considered a geeky tool for a few addicts. After a year or so, it quickly turned into a great way to exchange thoughts and links with other friends from the mobile/IT community. But then everything got mixed up, at least on my Twitter account: as the tool grew in popularity, so did my number of followers and followees.
From my crazy aunt Margaret (that’s not her real name but she does exist) to the pro at my tennis club, the list just grew more and more random. And you can’t really turn people down: in the same way that on Facebook, it’s hard to decline the friend request of someone you’ll see the next day at the office, it’s bad Twitter diplomacy to not follow someone following you, if you know that person in real life.
But the difference with Facebook is that whereas on the latter, updates are essentially fun/family oriented, on Twitter, it’s a big salad bowl of business and personal. And with all the tweets I had coming in, from Margaret ranting about how her Doctor is a crook to the junior high school friend complaining all day about her postpartum hair loss, I would usually miss the interesting, crispy, relevant stuff from the guy whose conference I had attended the week before.
And that would work the other way around too… When I wanted to write a comment about the previous night out that would crack up my mates, but would more than likely shock my employer, what was I supposed to do?
Unless I wanted to offend half the people I knew by removing them from my Twitter, it seemed that there was only one efficient way out: closing the account, and starting everything from scratch.
Now, it’s been a few months. I’ve been using Facebook exclusively for personal stuff. With its rich content, I find it definitely more adapted to that than Twitter. And for the really sensitive stuff, that I wouldn’t want Margaret or my colleagues to see, I created a separate Facebook account, under a private-joke code name. I’ve only given it out to a few friends, and can freely let loose on my politically incorrect sense of humor and embarrassing pictures of the night before.
Now that the personal stuff has been taken care of, I can safely go back to Twitter to make it 100% professional, which is clearly what I think it does best: 140 characters forces you to be sharp and to the point; it’s the ultimate elevator pitch.
I’ve warned my friends on Facebook that all my tweets will be relevant to my job, and that I will only follow people of professional relevance to what I do. As a result, I’ll be able to engage in clean, constructive, parasite-free interaction with people I come across in the Africa mobile content community, which is the area I work in, without offending the other people I care about.
So if you’re a friend of Margaret’s, I’ll be more than happy to show you pics of my son on Facebook. But if you’re a mobile telco professional in Africa, then you can find me on @alexgrouet, as of today. And if you’re both, we’ve got so much to talk about that we might even want to consider making a huge leap into reality and… arrange a Skype call!
Alexander Grouet, Business Development Director – Africa.
Mira Networks
Great article. I personally think Twitter can be used for fun too, but I certainly like your way of thinking!
Someone should tell him about Twitter ‘lists’
Helps to separate the mostly meaning tweets from the noise.