In the last month we have been chin-deep, managing&moderating a mixture of client; blogs, idea exchanges, ratings and twitter channels. I have not been personally immersed in several disparate channels, simultaneously, to this extent before - personal use of these channels is nowhere near as intense as client projects. But bleary eyes and elevated caffeine levels have resulted in a new understanding of the different conversational styles that take place on various social platforms. My modest insights;

• Regular contributors to our blogs are rarely on twitter and if they are, tend to be active in one place at a time (those that use consistent screen names anyway), either twitter or the community
• twitter users are very open to reading blogs, especially linked from tweets. When they click through and visit our blogs they spend significantly more time and read more pages than visitors from other sources. I do not know if this is because they are avid blog readers, slow readers or just have never visited before, are curious, so take a good look around
• Power users rule, and they tend to be regular commenters rather than regular idea generators - though they refine ideas from others regularly
• There is a distinctly different rhythm to each network - twitter is the most frenetic, facebook in the middle (depending on the brand involved), then ideas exchanges (depending on the category under discussion) and even our most energetic blog has a leisurely pace and a long active life compared to the average tweet.

To add some rigour to this anecdotal research, I recently read a research summary by Anderson Analytics. Their more studied findings;

• Facebookers are more likely to be; married, white and retired than users of other social networks, and have an average of 121 connections
• Twitterers are the super-user group, with a high interest skew to news, restaurants, sport, politics, personal finance and religion. They shop more online than other groups.
• MySpacers they classify as the young, the fun and the fleeing.
• LinkedIn users are all about business, the only place where there are more men than women, have the highest incomes and are more interested than others in gambling and soap operas...

Why do you favour one venue over another? Do you?