Mel Tajon

Multiple Social Graphs

Last year I attended two reunions — one with my childhood friends and the other being my High School reunion. While I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping in touch with my childhood friends, most of my high school friends I hadn’t talked to since graduation.

But if there is one thing that I have in common with both groups of friends, it’s Facebook.

It came up several times in conversation. Friends would tell me how much they loved my status updates.

“Mel, I saw your status about a bee attacking you while you were peeing. HILARIOUS!”

“Mel, I love your food pics! Keep posting those!”

Sweet! I’m e-popular at my high school reunion, hahah. But not all of it was positive. One of my friends came up to me:

“Mel, I don’t fucking understand half of your status updates. What the hell is ‘RT’? And what’s up with the ‘@’ signs? And what are the #’s for?”

At the time I was pushing all of my Tweets from my personal account straight to my Facebook. I spent 15 minutes trying to explain to her the concepts of retweets, hashtags and @mentions…but she ended up even more confused and walked away.

So that’s when it hit me. That is when I realized that even though most of my Twitter followers are my personal friends on Facebook, the two are very different audiences. Or rather, different social graphs.

The reality is we have a social network for just about every possible social graph these days:

• Personal friends? Got ‘em on Facebook.
• Colleagues and business contacts? Got ‘em on LinkedIn.
• Friends that enjoy my food pics? Instagram (for me, anyway)
• Local friends that wanna know where the party is at? Foursquare.

Even with Twitter, I have two very distinct accounts. One that is for professional topics and the other for personal tweeting…kinda like having a Facebook Profile for personal friends and a Facebook Page for fans.

It’s something that I started doing because I realized that most of my personal friends don’t have an interest in my professional/geek side. The few friends of mine that are interested? They’ll follow both of my accounts. And the few times that a tweet overlaps both social graphs? I’ll tweet it on one and retweet it on the other. Or I’ll just tweet the same thing on both.

@AndyBudd once asked, “is there a right way to tweet?”

My response? There is a time and a place for everything — the wisdom comes from knowing when and where.

Before you start whipping me with “it’s my Twitter account, I can tweet whatever I want!” ask yourself this:

Do my Facebook friends really care about #FollowFriday?

Do my Twitter followers really care if I check into a gas station to fill up gas?

Do my Twitter followers really care to click a non-descriptive “Photo: http://tumblr.com/asdfghj”?

There are so many damn social graphs, some of us don’t know what to do with all of them. But, these graphs are separate for a reason, so we should treat them as such.

If a person is really interested in your location, they’ll follow you on Foursquare. If they’re really interested on your Tumblr posts, they’ll follow you on Tumblr.

So disable all that cross-site auto-posting stuff. Be selective when cross-posting on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Tumblr. Realize the context of who are you talking to, why the follow you and what you are sharing with them. Or simply, before sharing anything on any social network, just ask yourself:

“Who would care about this?”