Follow / Not Follow — Friend / Not Friend

How could I offend someone because I won’t follow them back on Facebook but I am happy to do so on Twitter?  I managed to do so.

I recently had a wonderful and interesting discussion with an excellent blogger, Brett Simmons, after reading his great post: Personal Branding: How and Why I Use Twitter Perhaps it got too personal and it ended rather abruptly.  You tell me if I was out of line arguing that Twitter and FaceBook are different and can be used differently.

So I have a clear policy and I am public about it.  However, it is my experience that most people don’t read it.  Not sure why that is.  Why would someone be offended when I point it out to them and tell them that I won’t be “friending” them immediately but probably will do so if we continue to have meaningful online interactions?

Anyway, thanks to Brett I realized that I wasn’t quite as consistent in my FaceBook policy and my FaceBook restrictions.  Turns out that is was pretty easy to locate me – picture and all in any search.  I thought I had a set up some decent privacy settings but I was wrong.  That is fixed now.  Guess that I had better take the FaceBook link out of my Key Social Networks to the right as well.

Consistency is sometimes more important than transparency as you do the latter without congruence first.

“I see Twitter for information consumption,” wrote one Mashable reader. “I see Facebook for keeping in touch with friends. Too different to put head to head.”

The picture has no relationship to anything – just liked it.