Why Twitter Fails and Facebook Wins as a Social Network
I’m focused here on the "social" not the network, and the average user. Twitter may very well be the foundation of the real-time web and possibly an enabling component to a future semantic web. However, it has become clear to me that it is not a very good social network.
The realization that this was the case came over time while increasing my use of Twitter, putting messages out there and watching what came back. I noticed that the people responding were not the people I was following. I expect this is counterintuitive for many new users and likely leads to confusion. The people you follow are often not the people who follow you. Your view of Twitter, the people you see, is not where your updates are being directed.
Contrast this to Facebook, where nearly everyone you "follow" also follows you back. The only way for these two groups to not be the same on Facebook (followers vs. friends you follow) is to use the "hide" features of Facebook to completely block the updates of people in your friends list. From my informal survey this week I found that hardly anyone hides friend updates.
If you really look at who you follow and who follows you on both Twitter and Facebook, for most users it looks something like this:
For Facebook, your updates go out to the same people you are getting updates from. They see your updates and you see theirs. Further, given the ability to comment, "interaction" happens. This is the "social" part that Facebook makes work.
For Twitter, your updates go out to a different group than those whom you are watching. There usually is some overlap but that overlap tends to be less than you think and is effectively minimized even further if you are following any number of the popular and prolific Twitter stars. These users or feeds tend to fill your view of Twitter updates but have a very small percentage of users they follow back.
Twitter is like standing in the middle of a crowded party where everyone faces one way. You get to listen to the people in front of you but only talk to the people behind you.
Take this case of some tech blogger early adopters of Twitter. I wrote a tool this week that goes out and looks at their followers and friends and then compares the two lists to find the overlap. They look like this:
Take the case of Robert Scoble, a popular blogger, a very early adopter of Twitter, and a proponent of "following" as he has discussed in the past. Only 43% of Twitter accounts that Robert follows follow him back. Further, his list of followers is nearly 7 times his list of friends. If you follow him, chances are he is not following you back. This is even more extreme in the cases of Tom Merritt, Leo Laporte, and Molly Wood (some of my favorite webcasters/bloggers) who’s lists of followers are 70, 131 and 185 times bigger, respectively, than their friend lists.
A picture of some of the more average users from my friends and followers that I sampled looks like this:
The conclusion is pretty clear, without a lot of work to push those two circles together, Twitter is not much of a social network. Instead, it is a micro feed service which exhibits some of the characteristics of a social network and in special circumstances can be made to act like one. Twitter is more of a one way fan/feed service where only some limited interaction with your fans or people you are a fan of typically happens. Experienced users are able to hammer this model into some semblance of a social experience, but for many the "social" will be elusive. Understanding this will hopefully help users get what the service is and is not, and allow them to use it for what it does well without getting turned off by missed expectations.
One way of looking at this is that Facebook is like going to a pub with your friends: you predominantly interact with people you already know, though on the fringes some new people may poke their way in. Twitter in contrast is more like going to a local event such as a talk. You know that you’ll meet people with similar interests and come across people you probably wouldn’t otherwise meet.
Which is more “social”? That can rapidly degenerate into a semantic argument but there is an essential difference: is being social about interacting with people you already know or about interacting with people you share an interest with?
I suspect most of us, whether for personal or business reasons, want a bit of both – and that’s why Facebook and Twitter are complimentary for many people
Very interesting article
Great observation, I’ve never felt very social on Twitter. It’s so noisy there and everyone is a specialist. It can be quite. Revealing to see who is actually interested (following) in you.
Gr8 article.
Really helps understanding the ups & downs of Twitter.
Twitter is a channal while FB is medium.
Still I love Twitter & i don’t use FB
I think it is a very idealist view that social interactions are somehow balanced. The idea that fans and followers all interact to the same degree would assume that all people interact the same way.
If you attend any social function (IRL) you will notice that there are those who basically carry the conversation, and others who simply absorb what is going on around them. You’ll see a few sitting by the bar watching the game with no sound on the television who will occasionally grunt and groan at a bad call by the ref or high five the guy next to them when his/her team scores while others are engaged in the solve-the-worlds-problems debates.
My personal feeling about facebook and linked in is that the interactions go in two main camps: 1) meaningless comments that nobody really cares about, or 2) cleansed pontifications about the meaning of life. I find twitter to be somewhere closer to ‘real’ interaction, the way that people interact when they pass in the hall or stand next to each other in a line up.
Many people who use twitter have very overlapping ‘friend’ groups, but thanks to humans all being different, the patterns of ‘real’ people will blow the ideal friend/follower overlap out of the water.
Great article. One hint: People like Scoble with their Pages on Facebook may also get a lot of comments from people they don’t know or “follow back”.
Mark – I definitely agree that they can be complimentary. Facebook will tend to be more of an echo chamber. Twitter can immensely valuable as a pipeline to a broader set of ideas, whether or not it is very social.
Shawn – Good point on social interaction not being balanced. There is probably a set of sociological profiles of communicator types at a party that could be applied. What Twitter sometimes limits is the opportunity to step across those boundaries.
Paul – True Paul, but they still get the comments. Even with a fan page on Facebook, any user can jump in there and post to the wall. I agree that Robert probably can’t have a conversation with everyone that follows him, but the opportunity is there.
[...] same time and by sheer coincidence, I happened to come across an article by Jeff Vilimek, entitled Why Twitter Fails and Facebook Wins as a Social Network. In it, he describes an analysis he conducted of Twitter and Facebook users. To complete it, [...]
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You really seem to forget that the magic of twitter is asymmetric following.
It’s not, and has never been a social network. It’s been a way to follow what’s going on without the noise and pain of a social network like facebook.