Friendship model vs. following model - 5 reason why twitter is more honest in terms of building up relationships

So far I haven’t written too much about social media, but now I had clearly some thoughts and would like to share them.

Today I thought about the relationship models and the differences between facebook and twitter.

Personally I find twitter a better tool for building up relations and communication than facebook because of 5 reasons:

1. Twitter is about following and not about requesting friendships. I may talk here specifically about the word “friend”.

Real good friends (where you talk about your feelings and your private stuff) in life you have not more then finger on your hands – then probably 10-15 other in your daily routine (which you tell your daily stories or s.th.)  - and the others are more or less buddies or favor relations (favor in terms of – you think about they can do a favor for you – or you a favor for them) – the “rest” is not really relevant – since you probably have forgotten where you have met them … and since twitter uses “following” and “followers” I interpret this word as more fitting… – and really aren’t you happy, that you don’t have to follow everybody? And even then if you cross an interesting person and follow them – you always give them the chance – to let them decide weather they follow you back or not.

2. Twitter is about making the message as short as possible – the best idea ever – to have not more than 160 character. As I am German I have to admit – in our language it is even most difficult to drop a message inside a 160 words message – since – we 1. have much longer words – 2. we don’t have so many abbreviations for words e.g. thank you -> tnk u, think -> tnk, like -> lk, friendship -> frndshp. We would write thank you -> Danke Ihnen(formal)/Dir(non fomal), friendship -> Freundschaft… etc. but really – our tweets are longer – and we first would need to invent a short message language… therefor English is the perfect language for keeping it short (and international) – I am just remembering the KISS…

3. Twitter has no barrier – in facebook you need start a study to understand the easy security model…

4. Twitter is secondly about films, music, other media – in facebook we find ourselves often distracted by checking pictures or ending up in YouTube watching not only the video our “friends” have posted.

5. TweetDeck is because of Twitter – not because of facebook

My conclution is:

I heard, saw and read about people complaining that if they follow somebody – that if they don’t follow back – then – they might have their reasons for it. And probably if you push them – they might not have even the chance to build up an own independent interest in you or let’s say your message.

1. So give people you follow their time – and if they might follow back – I believe it is more honest then accepting a steadily popping up friend request on facebook of the person you might want to avoid…

2. If people don’t follow you, you might have nothing interesting to present or it might be not very positive.

3. English is the perfect language for Twitter

4. Short text which is creating an “image” of a thought (in that case) more valuable then 1000 words

5. Use TweetDeck or HootSuite if you aren’t already doing it to schedule tweets

What do you think? Do you agree?

Somehow I find this quite fitting here:

I am happy to get some comments or tweets back @Michelanglo

Have a nice day!

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