A Twitterholic's First 3 Days on Facebook - Lessons Learned

I consider myself to be a Twitterholic. Except for on holidays when I’m not working, I’m on Twitter every single day for hours. If I’m on my computer, I’m on Twitter. They go hand in hand in my day.

I follow a lot of people, and I have a lot of followers on Twitter. I consider myself to be a pretty experienced tweeter. However, up until three days ago, I had zero experience on Facebook.

Since my best friend on Twitter, @mistygirlph, has been telling me how fun Facebook is for about a year, I finally decided to give it a try. A lot has happened in the three days I’ve been on Facebook, and for any other newbies out there (I might be the last person to get on Facebook), I thought I would share my experiences.

First, the good stuff:

1. It completely blew my mind that you can type comments and messages with more than 140 characters. I am so used to only 140, actually, I try to keep most of my tweets to 120 characters to leave room for an RT. I eat, sleep and dream in 120-140 characters. Having more room to type was a little uncomfortable for me at first, but I got used to it quickly.

2. I think it’s crazy cool how easy it is to share on Facebook. Whether it’s articles, photos, links or music, I figured it all out in a matter of minutes. I understand now why so many people love it; it is very user friendly.

3. It feels really good to be a newbie again. It’s so much fun to learn from my Twitter friends that are now teaching me about Facebook. I’m very grateful for them. It’s fun to have that sense of excitement combined with nervousness that you get from a new social media experience, I love it.

Now the not so good stuff:

1. On Twitter, I am very savvy and I know not to click on rogue DM links or spam tweets… on Facebook, I’m not street smart at all. I was having a good old time clicking on everything and guess what happened? My windows installation on my iMac was trashed, toasted, exploded and destroyed. I have to reload it today. From now on, I will only be visiting Facebook from the protection of my Mac.

2. It is so addicting. Maybe I just have social media addiction tendencies because I’m completely addicted to Twitter also. However, I was not expecting to have as much fun on Facebook as I did. As a result, I am several days behind on my writing and my work. I guess I should have taken @mistygirlph’s advice and practiced better time management when I was on there!

3. Unless someone is a spammer, a porno chick with a booby avatar or a psycho, I follow back on Twitter. I still haven’t figured out if I should do that on Facebook yet. So far, I have friended everyone. I also don’t know how many times is appropriate to update your status, once an hour, once a day? But these are all things I’m sure I will learn as I go.

The support and love I have received from all of my Twitter friends on Facebook brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. If you look at my wall (that’s what it’s called, right? LOL) you’ll see so many welcoming and encouraging messages.

We truly are all one big family, and I didn’t know this until now, but the relationships we build transfer over to other social media sites, which also makes me think they would transfer over into “real life.” It is such a statement of happiness and hope. It once again proves that these friendships are real, and there is a real person behind each avatar.

In my opinion, it is so important to show each other kindness and respect in social media because this is the real deal. Thank you to everyone who has been so nice to me on Facebook. I am blessed to have so many Internet friends from around the world. You are all my family, and I love you dearly.