This blog is starting to sound like a confessional

Photo credit.

Once again, I have a confession to make: I don’t have Facebook.

And in the beginning, I wasn’t the only one. Back in high school, there was a group – albeit a small, handful size group – of us who who weren’t ready to jump on the Facebook bandwagon.

Over the years, I’ve watched as one by one, my friends from that group have given in to the powers of Facebook and signed themselves up for an account, until there was no one left but me.

“And then there was one.”

That’s not to say I haven’t considered it. I certainly have, especially going into post-secondary education where you can befriend someone in one class, only to lose contact with them once that class ends.

But what keeps me away from the time-waster that is Facebook is – well, just that. I’ve watched friends and classmates waste away in front of it, and I prefer to spend my time doing something more productive. I also question whether I want to know that much information (you know what I mean) about everyone I meet. But that’s just me.

Still, I can’t deny the enormous popularity of Facebook, and other social media tools, and as a public relations student, have to consider what it means when it comes to PR.

Our major project in PR class this term is to develop a fully-fledged proposal to publicize Sean Garrity’s new film, Zooey & Adam. Many of us have chosen “20 somethings” and college/university students as our target audience, which means a lot of our tactics to reach them involve social media.

Facebook and Twitter are the popular kids of the social media crowd; many people are involved with both, yet don’t always realise how they use each of them for different purposes.

But understanding these differences is crucial in creating a PR proposal that can maximize the benefits of each effectively. And after chatting this week with some friends who have both, I think I’ve grasped the gist of it.

Facebook tends to be primarily for interaction with friends and family, whereas Twitter is a combination of friends, family, and celebrities or businesses. Many celebrities have Twitter accounts, probably because they are one of the easiest social media tools to maintain, and manages to be personal (posting status updates to the world) without being too intrusive (no lengthy bio to fill out, relationship statuses to change, photo albums to fill).

The type of interaction and communication, however, differs significantly on each site.

Twitter is (in some ways) a one-way conversation: posting updates and interesting links to inform your followers and whoever might be watching, but not necessarily to interact with them on a lengthy personal level.

With Facebook, however, you can communicate through pictures and messages (longer than 140 characters) that describe things beyond what you’re doing, where you’re going, who you’re with, and what you find interesting.

One of my friends mentioned that she comments more on Facebook because she can comment directly, rather than @replying, or “RT”ing on Twitter. And, perhaps most importantly, you can see communications from other people TO other people on the same topic. If you comment on a friend’s Facebook photo, you’ll be able to see (and receive notifications) when other people have also commented on that photo.

Communicating on Facebook can also be much simpler: photos and videos are automatically embedded, and can be uploaded in multiples at a time. Twitter is more suited to sharing one photo or one video, and relies on links (which you have to shorten first) to direct you outside the Twitter site, instead of having one central “page” where everyone can view everything related to that one person.

This personal information is primarily what people go to Facebook for. Pictures, relationship statuses, events – as a friend of mine so eloquently said “Facebook is a good stalking tool.”

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to be used more for receiving breaking news and gossip, in combination with keeping up with friends/family on a less intimate level: random, mundane updates on what they happen to be doing or interesting in at the moment.

As such, a “good” person to follow on Twitter would be someone who has something to offer that is valuable to you, whether it be a friend who posts humourous life commentary or a media outlet that provides breaking news. A “good” person to friend on Facebook is generally someone you know, or have met due to the volume of personal information contain on one’s Facebook page.

So what does this mean for us PR people who want to use social media to target our audiences? First, like with any other communication tool, you have to know your audience. Then, you have to know what kind of information you want to communicate, and what kind of interaction or relationship you want with your audience.

If you’re simply going to be playing the messenger – frequently (ie. daily, hourly) passing along tid bit size info (A photo, A website, A video) to your audiences – with little interaction other than the occasional “thank you” , for example, if someone tweets that they enjoyed watching your client’s film, then Twitter is the way to go.

If you’re going to be playing the virtual scrapbooker/host – infrequently (ie. weekly) posting information like show times, event details, visuals (photos & videos) – and want two-way, longer-than-140-character, “friend-like” communication with your audience, then you’ll want to consider Facebook.

In this sense, Facebook is a great way to document an event over a long period of time, in that posting things like photos and videos which people can comment on, and feed off other people’s comments, can produce valuable feedback.

Thanks to @changingheaven and @alyssajm for their input.