Why do people prefer Facebook to LinkedIn and vice versa? The NextStage CRO explains.

Mention online social networks and the two that readily come to most people's minds are LinkedIn and Facebook.

However, there are currently more online social networking opportunities than most people are aware of. You can find an extensive list on Wikipedia. I wrote about online social networks in LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup, Hwarang-Do, GeechieGoomie, FriedDough, NashuaRadiatorCompany.

Recently, NextStage has been studying why people prefer one social networking site over another and what this has to do with marketing. This learning applies to all social networking sites, but in this column I'm going to reference only LinkedIn and Facebook for expediency's sake.

Long before people knew what an online social network was I belonged to several. Nobody called them online social networks back then. They had names like CompuServe, AOL, Genie and I think I belonged to one that began with a "U." Before these, I belonged to even more primitive (by today's standards) online social networks known as Bulletin Boards (BBSes).

Their functions were quite the same as LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup, Spoke, Spock, Spick (do social networks have tenses?), Jigsaw, etc. The functions I'm writing about are to provide a gathering spot for people with like interests to meet and exchange information for and about each other. People reached out to each other, people learned about each other, people created relationships with each other.

At NextStage, one of the things we've noticed is how users of such sites have changed.

Birds of a feather don't always flock together: migration paths
I mentioned above that there are hundreds of social networking sites available. How come LinkedIn and Facebook stand out?

Simple and obvious after the fact, these two networks tend to migrate users more than any others. People may be on Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, but they don't migrate from one to the other in the behavioral ethology sense. Likewise, someone on LinkedIn may also have a presence on MySpace (either corporate or individual) and there is no migration.

There is migration between LinkedIn and Facebook, though.

I'll guess that there are more Facebook users with LinkedIn profiles than vice versa as a percentage of user populations, and that this will change as job mobility begins to affect 19- to 35-year-olds more and more. I don't know this for a fact nor is there enough data for me to state it as such.

It is something we've been noticing for a while, though. And this is a true migration with people going both back and forth. There are specific things people find each useful for, and as long as there are people who need to navigate both types of worlds, they'll migrate back and forth as required.

What I am confident and comfortable sharing is that the typical visitor aspect has more to do with self-identity and self-recognition concepts than it has to do with demographics.

This is a razor's edge kind of statement. Self-identity and self-recognition have traditionally been tied quite strongly to demographics.

Are you who you think you are (and do others believe you?)
Online, anybody with a computer can be anything they want.

Take a walk in Second Life and you'll find yourself engaging with dinosaurs, aliens and sometimes humans. It's like the Star Wars Cantina in there. This ability to metamorph transcends virtuosity and makes itself known in reality via the ubiquity of computers, online access, PDAs and the like.

More and more people are defining their real selves (what NextStage calls "rSelves") based on their cyber selves (or "eSelves"). The reason is simple: Which world offers more power and more freedom to the average person? I'll never play in the real world NBA, but online?

This self-definition is interesting because it demonstrates itself in who'll take part in what. LinkedIn has far fewer methods of person-to-person interaction than Facebook. A demonstration of this is the relatively recent addition of image files to the user's LinkedIn profile.

Fewer methods of person-to-person contact can be limiting to some and liberating to others. As one person wrote me in preparation for this column, "I just want to know if someone's done web analytics. I don't want to know their favorite music, write on their wall, quote Lao Tzu or play a movie game with them."

Another person wrote that Facebook was a great "time suck" because they were constantly getting messages about people waiting for planes, preparing presentations, listening to someone else, going out for pizza, or wondering what to do.

That offered, the same individual who won't go to Facebook to look for job candidates will go there to learn about interesting music, theater, movies and books.

It's not who you know; it's how you want to know them.
Social networks form in rWorld for a variety of reasons including: similar ethnicity, vocations, avocations, belief systems and educational backgrounds. There are some subtle yet powerful differences between rWorld and eWorld social networks. The most telling and least investigated one is this: rWorld social networks form because people find each other; eWorld social networks form because someone unassociated with the reason for the social network's existence creates a place where people can be found. (I talk about this switch in reasons why social networks form in more detail in Reading Virtual Minds.)

Social networks will form online or off whether or not there's a place that facilitates their formation and growth. But just because something's easier to do doesn't mean that it's better.

In fact, often making something easier to do alters the reasons to do it.

Greater knowledge doesn't mean greater intimacy
If you are reading this and you're on LinkedIn, how many people are you linked to? And of all those people you are linked to...

• How many do you email at least once a month?
• How many do you talk with (on the phone, VoIP, etc.) at least once a month?
• How many do you see (webcam, etc.) at least once a month?

Now here comes the big one: how many are you actually close enough to touch at least once a month? The numbers get smaller and smaller for most people and this phenomena isn't limited to LinkedIn. It's true of all social networking sites and deals with levels of intimacy. My own research into these phenomena led me to create a newsletter, The NextStage Irregular, to finalize this segment of my exploration.

An amazing thing happened when I sent out an email inviting people to sign up for The NextStage Irregular, people who had contacted me to join their LinkedIn network wrote asking who I was, how I got their email address and how did I know them?

Obviously the reason for their reaching out to me via LinkedIn has long faded from their memory, and I'll bet many of them might see my name in their listing and wonder who I am. That is, my value to them no longer exists (if it ever did at all).

This is also true with Facebook and here the levels of intimacy are greatly confused. I can know who's doing what where, what they're listening to, who they're talking with, and really not know anyone at all. A recent podcast on Susan Bratton's DishyMix, Why People Do What They Do - Brain Science, made me very popular on Facebook. First, I'm flattered and honored by the people who connected with me. Second, I'm amused at what they send me ("Yes, that's a beautiful picture of your daughter." "No, I've never heard that kind of music before." "Yes, you do look good in your gym outfit." "No, I don't think I'd like to buy your house.").

What you do and which you choose is related to how you think
One of the things that quickly became obvious was the vocational differences between Facebook and LinkedIn users. I gave an example of differences in neural processing (ways of thinking) in "Help visitors focus and reap the rewards."

The card shuffling example in that article is tied to whether or not an individual will favor Facebook or LinkedIn. If that card shuffling challenge is either easy or difficult, chances are you'll favor Facebook. Neither hard nor easy? Chances are you'll favor LinkedIn. Sometimes any of the above, you'll find a home in each.

There's another visual example of vocational differences in my DC Emetrics Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing: An eMetrics Summit Case Study presentation and Audience Focused Optimization class. That image is shown here:

Some people will see the dancer spinning clockwise, others counterclockwise. That difference in visual processing is due to both training and natural neural wiring. What it reveals is a pretty close breakdown of who'll be on LinkedIn versus who'll be on Facebook (or similar sites serving the same audiences).

Want to know if you'll do well on both? How easily can you get the dancer to change direction? Want to know how to get her to change direction? That's an article for another day...

Additional resources:

• Flock, The Social Web Browser
• Ajay Jain's Ten Ways to Get LinkedIn to Work for You Whitepaper
• Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 2 "What this Book is About"

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research. Read full bio.