Social media is about amplifying your message. If you bump into your pal on the street and let them know you just had a great egg & cheese sandwich at that coffee shop right over there, well you’ve just told one person. Perhaps word of mouth will spread that message. Perhaps not.

Now here comes a few folks to help you spread the word.

Facebook first.

Facebook allows you to say your thing about your sandwich but to a whole lot of folks—folks that you’ve chosen, and folks who have chosen back (accepted your ‘Friendship’). That’s pretty powerful. Now, let’s say that a ‘Friend’ likes your post and they want to share it with their ‘Friends’—it can’t happen.  This happened to me. My friend posted a YouTube vid on his Wall—I saw, commented, and wanted to share it with all of my ‘Friends’—didn’t happen. Clunkage. I had to go to YouTube, get the link, come back to Facebook and post it. Yes, there’s a pretty well-thought-out privacy policy preventing this type of thing, but Facebook is missing out by not allowing—encouraging!—this type of sharing.

Let’s take a look at Twitter.

Twitter’s ‘Retweet’ is power. It’s the Marshall Stack of social media. If I see something in my ‘stream’ and I want to share it it—it’s just one click! It not only goes to all of my followers. What’s better is that if I do some Twinja (Twitter Ninja) and do something like “Hey, @myfriend, that was great [ rest of his post here…]” then I’ve just catapulted someone else’s Tweet into the Twittersphere—for the entire galaxy to consume.

The amplification effect is huge. In Twitter. Not really in Facebook.

What’s Facebook doing about this shortcoming?

Did I mention that you can link Twitter to Facebook but not the other way around? Tsk tsk.