Changing How I use Twitter and Facebook

Lately I've found that some of my friends on Facebook are getting a little frustrated with my constant talking about Windows Azure.  As hard as it is for me to understand, not everyone is as fascinated by this product as me. 

When I first started using Twitter and Facebook, I used Twitter mainly for personal updates and linking it to my Facebook status was an easy to way to keep everything up to date.  Now that the volume of work related Tweets has increased so signficantly my Facebook friends are getting spammed with Azure, Azure and more Azure.  So I turned off the link to have Twitter update Facebook status.  Personal updates are going to Facebook, and other stuff is going to Twitter.

What made me think about de-linking these was this great post on personal productivity tips at GigaOM. Read the whole thing here, but tip #1 made a good point.

Pick a social network for each persona, and be strict about who gets in. Maybe Facebook is for friends and LinkedIn is for business. Or maybe you have a secret identity on Facebook for your buddies or a password-protected personal blog. The web offers many wonderful tools for updating folks about your personal life, but the best ones offer you a way to keep others out. Use these filters, especially if you don’t want to offend coworkers or clients with the latest tale about your ex. Don’t rely on them not finding you. They can — and will.

Comments

[Jason Martin]

The last three sentences are the best advice. I realize just how important that was when a client found my (largely personal) public profile on Facebook. I didn't realize it was public and didn't quite know what to do when he began talking about my political views, which I go to great lengths to keep out of the therapeutic relationship. He disagreed with the views he had read, but he was cool enough to laugh it off. I would not be so lucky with other clients. Needless to say, my Facebook profile is now for friends-only and will stay that way. As a side note, I generally open Facebook only to people I've met face-to-face. If you've never had a conversation with me without an electronic intermediary, we aren't hooking up on Facebook.

Have you considered 2 separate Twitter accounts, one for personal tweets and one for business/professional tweets?