POV: Are Facebook and Twitter users two different species?

Facebook and Twitter have revolutionised communication in the digital age. A look at how the two platforms use the same medium to fulfil different needs.

Today, Facebook and Twitter constitute a major part of a person's day to day communication needs, albeit from very different perspectives. While Facebook cashes on 'making friends', Twitter urges one to follow. How people react to these platforms is completely different, too.

Pradeep Chopra, co-founder and CEO, Digital Vidya

Fundamentally, Facebook is a social network and Twitter is an interest network. That's why 'Add Friend' is used on Facebook and 'Follow' on Twitter. Someone had once mentioned this interesting quote describing the difference between Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn - 'Facebook is for people you knew, LinkedIn is for people you know and Twitter is for people you want to know'. Due to this fundamental difference, the way a user participates on Twitter is different from the way s/he participates on Facebook.

Besides, Facebook is much easier to use and logical to participate as compared to Twitter and accordingly, there is a high percentage of non active users on Twitter. However, users who continue to stay active and build followership on Twitter are more influential than the users who have a huge number of friends on Facebook.

Rajiv Dingra, founder and CEO, WatConsult

Facebook and Twitter are two different platforms from a feature to feature point of view. Facebook is a platform where one engages with friends or with people one knows and hence it limits one's social influence, while Twitter is an open platform for people to express their views for followers and not for friends.

Individual users on Twitter have more power to either appreciate or criticise a brand and make their view matter much more than a Facebook user. Facebook has a brand page concept which allows brands to be more of a broadcaster and hence a user of Facebook is more a consumer and 'liker' of content rather than a 'commentator' or a 'sharer'. On Twitter, where a brand is as powerful as the user, you see more customer service happening, as well as more retweets and consumer-led brand hashtags trending.

Harshil Karia, co-founder and online strategist, FoxyMoron

The people of these platforms are from two different planets.

People act as watchdogs on Facebook because they watch the content and then react to it; while on Twitter, people are very observant, have a take on things, share their opinions and discuss things. Besides, a Twitter user is a very active animal, while the Facebook user is a very laid back animal.

Deepak Goel, founder and CEO, Drizzlin Media

Twitter is more popular with people who want to find about the trends and new advancements. They give their take and share opinions on a subject and add to create an opinion. It is more advanced. While Facebook, with its photo sharing ability, is more popular among the younger generation, it is a casual medium where people want to know about others instead of any trends or any specific information.

Twitter is slightly complicated to use with its different features as compared to Facebook, though it brings together a lot of people from the same industry and genre to share their opinions.