The difference of course is what these two groups are looking for in social media. The first group is looking for conversation, and community. They tend to post what they are doing, interesting links they found, pictures of their lives. They reply to their friends tweets and buzzes, trying to engage in a conversation. If the number of followers they have gets too high, they tend to disengage from the conversation, often complaining that a conversation is no longer possible. This is what I call the social group. The second group is the media group. This group sees platforms like Twitter, Buzz and Facebook as a way to announce something whether its their latest blog post or product. Followers equal potential costumers, the more followers they have the better. There is of course a thin line between using Twitter to promote a product or post and spam. A line which those with a lot of followers have to tread carefully. The second group has little interest in conversation for the most part, they follow people because they know there is a good chance you will follow them back. Again, they are looking for potential customers.   

Are there exceptions to these groups, well of course there are. Robert Scoble for an example. He has over a hundred thousand followers, but is great at carrying on conversations with people who follow him. There are others like him, but they tend to be unique, most people with that many followers find it nearly impossible to carry on meaningful conversations. Celebrities often have hundreds of thousands of followers, but usually are only following a few hundred at the most. They carry on their conversations with those few hundreds, the rest of us are simply listening in the background.   Neither of these groups are wrong on how they use these sites, they just have different goals. With different goals, what they want from these sites also varies and conflict often occurs, how these sites handle these conflicts is the key to their survival.