Facebook Encourages “Live-Tweeting”… But Will Your Friends Appreciate It?
I was intrigued to see this sponsored poll (with rotating copy) on the Facebook Home page this afternoon. Facebook has been running sponsored polls in this slot on the right sidebar for a few months, but what’s notable about this is the call to action to update your status in real time in response to the presidential inauguration (in Twitter-speak, this would be considered “live-tweeting” the event).
A few obvious questions come to mind: Will anyone even pick up on this subtle suggestion? If they do, will Facebook users readily adopt this new pattern of behavior with regard to status usage? And will those who do try it piss off their friends so much that they are immediately de-friended at the altar of Whopper Sacrifice?
What do you think?
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5 Responses to “Facebook Encourages “Live-Tweeting”… But Will Your Friends Appreciate It?”
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many of we the avid tweeps already have the twitter app installed on Facebook which updates our Facebook status based on non-@ tweets in real time.
thus, anyone using this app who live-tweets these events will be doing so at Twitter and Facebook, and have probably already done so for other major events in the past.
i have not received any negative comments from friends about the frequency with which my Facebook status is updated, even during particularly busy windows of tweeting.
That’s true for those like yourself, however the majority of Facebook users (at least in in my network) use status updates very sparingly. A potential rule of thumb I read somewhere recently is that if you tweet more than 10x a day, it may be overload for your Facebook friends (even if they’re not actively complaining to you). I think that’s probably true for any News Feed updates — when I wrote 40 reviews in my first two days on Yelp (pushed to Facebook via Facebook Connect) I got some flak from my network for flooding their feeds.
with millions of users who all have a personal sense of what is or is not “normal” or “appropriate” i doubt rules of thumb are possible. what is a rule of thumb for high school users won’t apply to college, won’t apply to adults (which then bifurcate into dozens of sub-groups).
“those like myself”. who is that?
I’m referring to anyone who has synced their Facebook status with their Twitter stream. And you’re absolutely right about the different sub-cultures and -communities within Facebook. I can only speak to my own network, but I find myself filtering my content on Facebook for the common denominator (if there is one) across all of my clusters of connections.
[...] other words, Facebook is organizing a massive “live tweet” on inauguration day, and is somewhat reminiscent of Causes’ 1.6 million person status update [...]