Twitter is a great social network - after all, you can have quick
conversations with people, sharing your thoughts about a TV programme
"live", or commenting on a soccer player's mishaps on the field with
other Tweeters in the stadium. You can even tell people you are eating a
cheese sandwich, if you wish. However, when you look at a stream of
Tweets you will notice it is full of links - these take you to blog
posts, to pictures, to videos, essentially to other sources of
information.Over at Facebook, the density of links is lower. People hold
conversations and share pictures, or their play games with groups of
like-minded friends. But the sharing of information and leading people
towards other sites appears to be lower.Could it be that Facebook is
"more social" than Twitter? Do we use these different social networks for
alternative purposes?These are the kind of questions which are partially
answered by a new research study from the University of Manchester. The
research looked at 300 social networking users and was trying to find out
if there was any connection between personality type and which social
network people used. The study did not really find any strong connection
between measures of personality and either Twitter or Facebook. There
were some minor variations, but nothing significant.However, the study
revealed a difference in the way people tended to use these social
networks. It transpires that Twitter users seek more fulfillment of the
"need for cognition" - the psychological term for the desire to be
mentally stimulated. This suggests that what we want when using Twitter
are those links to more useful information, whereas we don't look for
this when we are on Facebook.It means that if you wish to make the most
of Twitter you need to be sure you add links to useful information - not
just fun stuff, but material which people will find interesting and
valuable. But if you do this on Facebook, the research implies that you
will get lower engagement because that's not the kind of thing we want to
find on that social network.The research is not really conclusive, but it
does demonstrate that we do appear to use different social networks for
alternative purposes. That means if you are using social media as a means
of promoting your business or connecting with your customers, you should
provide slightly different kinds of content on each network you engage
with. On Twitter, provide links to thought-provoking material - on
Facebook, just chat about that material.