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"Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). His homepage is: www.sorengordhamer.com. You can follow him on Twitter.\nThere is growing body of people who actively use more than one social network, and do so with quite different purposes. Though on the surface many social networks seem similar, to use them skillfully it helps to better understand the different roles they can play in one\u2019s online activity. Here\u2019s what I have discovered in my use of both Twitter and Facebook.\n\nTwitter\nConnecting with Someone You Don\u2019t Know\n\n\n\n\nIf I want to connect with someone I don\u2019t know, either for business, social, or personal reasons, I first look the person up on Twitter. I can generally learn much more about them through scanning their tweets than I can in looking at what they choose to show on their Facebook page. Reading their tweets I get a better sense if I want to contact them, and if I do, what their personality and interests tend to be. I can either @reply them or I can usually find a contact email in the website they list on Twitter. \nOf course, you can send people messages you do not know through Facebook, but such communication, to me, is more welcome via Twitter, as people still see Facebook (as much as they are trying to change) as oriented toward communicating with people one already knows.\nBreaking News\n\n\n\n\nLets face it, there is nothing quite like Twitter for breaking news. Sure, people post news on Facebook, but there is no easy way to retweet posts or to discuss the subject with the entire community, as Twitter allows through use of the hashtag. Further, people on Facebook are often attending to various other tasks while on the site; for much of the Twitter crowd, discovering and sharing news is their primary focus. \nNew Learning and Discovery\n\n\n\n\nTwitter could be seen as one massive introduction system, where users recommend other users both through retweeting and mentioning the person using the @username option. The popular #FollowFriday where users recommend other users is one example of this. Sure, you can recommend friends on Facebook, but not with same ease. \nDue to such simplicity, on Twitter you do not just get to know what a person\u2019s interests are, you also learn who influences that person, and can decide if these people are also of interest to you. As such, for new learning, I go to Twitter more than Facebook. \n\nFacebook\nLocal News/Events\nMore of my Facebook friends live closer to me geographically than those who follow me on Twitter. Though many people on Twitter list where they live in their profile, I have not taken the time to discover the locations of those who follow me (and I do not want to take the time to do so). I can only guess that they are interspersed throughout the country, and as such I do not want to bother them with local news. Facebook is also aided by the ability to start groups focused on a variety of subjects, including focused on local areas. \nThere are certainly ways to find local Twitter users, and Twitter wants to make this easier. CEO Evan Williams addressed this some time back by suggesting using usernames as directional tools. People could follow @sf (for San Francisco), for example, then begin a post with @sf when they wanted to send information to those interested in the city. However, the effort has not seemed to gain traction, and how to make it easy and simple to access local information is still in its early stages on Twitter. \nConnecting with Someone You Know\n\n\n\n\nIf I am trying to connect with someone that I know, I am more apt to use Facebook, if I know the person uses both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook allows me to see if the person is on the network at a given time, and I can easily start a quick chat with them, or start a Skype or phone call if I know they are free. \nI can always, of course, send a private message to a friend through Twitter, but I like the immediacy of Facebook. I also find that I can have more sustained conversations on Facebook with those that I know, as people on Twitter focus more on \u201Cwhat\u2019s new\u201D than on sustaining a conversation as far back as yesterday. Facebook, with less emphasis on the latest news and more options for holding discussions, seems more suitable for longer conversations. \nHelp on an Issue\nIf I am looking for feedback on an issue, particularly personal, I am more apt to post it on Facebook. Though I have more than twice the number of followers on Twitter than friends on Facebook, recently when I posted on both networks asking what good audio books people could recommend for my son and I to listen to on a long drive, I had more than three times the responses on Facebook. Most the friends I have on Facebook I have met in person, and many have met my son, so they are in a much better place to make suggestions. It is not the same with those on Twitter. \nConclusion\nWhile on the surface many social networks look the same, there are significant differences, both in their structure and what they emphasize, but also in the attitude that users bring. The more we understand these, the more we can know which social networks to use for what purposes. \nClearly, there are many other reasons beyond what is listed here for using both Twitter and  Facebook. If you use both Twitter and Facebook, let us know, how you find yourself using one versus the other.\nMore social media resources from Mashable:\n- HOW TO: Deal With Social Networking Overload- Top 5 Funniest Fake Facebook Pages- 10 Impressive Implementations of Facebook Connect- Twitter for Beginners: 5 Steps for Better Tweeting"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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