The Social Pushmepullyou

Do you remember the Pushmi-pullyu from Hugh Loftings’  original Dr. Doolittle series? This was a two-headed creature, with a head at each end. Facebook and Twitter are very similar to this animal.

Twitter is the “push me”  part of it.  Twitter, Plurk, and other micro-blogging applications push users to click on links. This is due in part to the 140 character limit, and in part to the way many people use micro-blogs.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a pull technology. Once you’re pulled into the website, it never wants to let you go. This is due to the nature of the stickiness of the site, the games that are found there, and the many other nooks and crannies that you can explore there. There are several other social networks that do this as well, but Facebook is the best example of this.

The trick is to use these two types of technology to your best advantage. An example of this would be to use the micro-blogs to push people to your Facebook page (the former “fan page”), and then make that Facebook page as sticky as possible. Finding the right balance can be hard. What you don’t want to do, is to create only a Facebook page, and no website for the user to ultimately end up on. Again, going back to a previous post, social media is transient in nature. Whatever pages you create on social networks may not be there in the future, or may become inaccessible. So, my advice to you is to cover all your bases.