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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

Balsamiq has twice as many twitter followers as Facebook 'Fans'. I'm strongly of the opinion that the word 'Fan' and the way it shows up in your Facebook profile makes Facebook pages a lot less useful for businesses. I want to get info about balasamiq, but I am not ready to describe myself as a fan to everyone on my facebook friendslist, considering that I've not used it.

Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business without having to be a 'fan' of it. I think if they allowed this, facebook interaction between business and normal users would be much higher, considering the much larger facebook userbase.

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We have 5x as many Twitter followers as Facebook fans (363 vs. 74), but I'm not convinced it's as simple as semantics:

Facebook, despite their recent posturing, is for me still a personal sphere. Twitter, despite its flippant image, is for me about business. At the very least it's my web persona, rather than, say, my people-I've-known-since-I-was-11 persona. I follow a bunch of businesses (and moreso, business contacts) on Twitter. The only businesses I follow on Facebook are from friends who have nagged me about doing such. ;-)

Facebook is still a personal sphere, but some business do belong in my personal sphere. I'd probably not want your business in my facebook stream, since I don't use you, but there is this artist I know who often makes print that can be bought. I want to see what he's up to, and if there is something good, I'd like to buy it. My webhost, I'd be interested in seeing what they are up to, and knowing that all is safe. When Django is updated, would not mind seeing that in the stream too. I'd like to see politicians too - and I don't want to have to say I am their 'Fan' to see what they have to say or their photos!

I can construct my facebook to deliver the info I want to see. It's easy to hide info from a business when they start spamming and just as easy to remove them from my friends list.

So even though facebook started off as a personal sphere, I think it will have great utility for small business. It's possible to get personal with your customers.

Yep -- I can definitely see it on some of the more "personal" businesses (e.g. local arts). Balsamiq I think would fall out of that range for most users.

I wonder what percentage of web users start their sessions at Facebook these days? It's clear that that's what Facebook is going for, and what you're suggesting with something milder than "fan" (see updates from..., perhaps).

One interesting thing to throw into the fray there as well is that if a service that I regularly use is down, the first place I check is Twitter, and pretty universally, it works. Facebook still I think has a ways to go before it's seen as a primary source for news in the same way. Twitter is kind of the new RSS.

I don't think facebook has an interest in that - twitter is filtered rss. Friend filtered RSS. If more people would post links and less "Good morning!" then it would be more interesting.

Twitter is useless compared to Facebook. You get a lot more engagement from Facebook.

With twitter your window of opportunity is the 5 seconds that you show up in their feed. With Facebook that time is a lot longer.

You can have 10,000 followers on twitter, but only 20 people will see your announcement, since you'll show up in their feed for 5 seconds.

Anyone who follows a business account on Twitter, is most likely following more than 100 people(and most likely >1000), which means you are one of hundreds of people trying to talk to them

That's why you @reply them.

Not in a spammy manner, of course. But if someone's talking about your business on Twitter, engage them.

I was talking more about announcements.

I do the @reply thing, but it's a little sucky, since that @reply shows up in everyone's feed.

So long as you start the tweet with @[twitteruser], your @reply will only appear in someone's feed if they follow you and also the person you are sending the at-reply to. Or if they are the person you're sending the message to, of course.

that's the point, if my message is only to that one person, why would my followers want to read about it?

To clarify, your @reply won't necessarily appear in everyone's feed. It will only appear if:

1) They are the user you are sending the @reply to, OR 2) They follow you AND the person you send the @reply to.

So for example, if I follow @balsamiq and @fogbugz and @balsamiq sends an @reply to @fogbugz, that message will appear in my feed. But if @balsamiq sends an @reply to a user I do not follow, I will not see it in my feed.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. I think everyone see's your @reply -- perhaps you mean DMs?

jsb is correct; they made this change a few months back.

Extra tidbit: this is the reason for those ". @foo ..." tweets you may be seeing. If any character precedes the @, then the tweet will appear in all your follower's feeds; otherwise, it behave as jsb described.

I just don't get the utility of twitter for business. I see one great use for twitter, which is what I am using it for right now: Get major influencers to follow you. When you do that, you have a good chance to be republished by one of them, which is great PR.

(That's why I bothered writing two articles recently, trying to raise my twitter 'important people' follower count. It actually works somewhat.)

I'll give you an example, I needed to buy some wine as a gift. So I tweeted out to Gary Vaynerchuk what to buy. He tweeted back with a few suggestions. And I got into my car and drove down to Wine Library and bought one of his suggestions.

youre from jersey? respect++

I have repeatedly had exactly the opposite experience: I've gotten hundreds of respondents for surveys, driven traffic to new blog posts, and fully enrolled a class off Twitter posts, and have had Facebook attempts at the same things fizzle. Twitter has been a much more valuable tool for us than Facebook.

Which is fine, because my Facebook list is filled with people I went to high school with, who couldn't give less of a crap about what my company is doing this week.

I've found facebook to be better for interaction with users. I have ~800 Facebook fans, and ~150 twitter followers, and I get much more than 6x the page views/comments/etc from Facebook fans than from Twitter followers.

With Twitter, your tweets easily get lost in the sea of tweets, whereas Facebook stories persist in the fans' News Feeds for a while, and then show up even more if their friends interacted with it.

Those are exactly my thoughts - facebook is a lot more involved with the user, and so an interaction between user and business would be more personal, more viral and with a lot more info about your users.

I tried using twitter for business shortly, but it is too difficult to handle effectively. I've switched to facebook, and I'm seeing better results but I still dislike this 'fan' thing. People don't want to be fans, but they are interested in interacting.

Great observation.

> Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business

That has the same connotations to me, how about "follow"

Follow works even better. Now all we need is someone from Facebook to take part in this conversation...

Facebook does allow per-page-type changes in follow-verbs. For example, you don't "fan" a politician, you "support" them.

Page admins have no control over this, though, it's hard-coded per page type. So I can't imagine there's even that much work involved in changing the copy from "fan" to "follow" for certain page types (or even letting the page admin select among a few, pre-configure options when setting up the page).

What about I want to see what Linode vs Slicehost are up to, even though I am at Dreamhost? I would just like to follow them for a while while, get a feel of who they are before deciding. Not 'support' or 'fan' them. Facebook should change their verbs.

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