Consider a random, non-specific piece of content. It could be a blog post, an article, a picture, video, song or any other piece of digital information you can fathom. The content of the content is not important for what I am about to discuss. This post is concerned with why people share links more on a social network like Twitter than they do on a network like Facebook.

“Facebook is for friends,” is what you’re probably thinking. Good. Facebook is for friends, and you are interested in social media optimization. Your friends aren’t. They are your friends, probably in spite of your interest in things like social media optimization, and since they aren’t interested in this very specific topic, you may not feel compelled to share something so arbitrary to them.

Twitter is a public identity. Tweets are made public and search-able, friends are casual and sharing is a common cultural custom known as “tweeting.” Friends on the Twitter network are not only casual, they are usually also like-minded. Most super-users of the Twitter service have thousands of friends who follow the same topics. A niche-oriented piece of content is likely to get passed around more on Twitter than Facebook because Twitter users feel comfortable sharing what they might consider useful, informative or interesting to THEIR CONNECTIONS.

I’ve cited Mashable as a primary example of this phenomenon, a blog that gets thousands of ReTweets for tens of Facebook shares. It just goes to show how powerful an element mutual interest is in social media optimization. You should not only optimize your own social network around common interest, but you should target friends whose friends’ friends’ friends share the same interests. Food for thought.

Would you expect to see a lot of content sharing on a social network like Linkedin? Feel free to comment.