How I Use Social Media – or – Ways To Kill Your Day

So, I found this post on Chris Brogan’s site about 100 blog topics he’d like to see other people write. His suggestion was “How I Use Facebook”, but I thought I’d expand that a bit to include the spectrum of social media I use.

The number of people using some type of social media is growing daily. And most folks gravitate toward one or the other. I, being a bit of a geek, use a variety of tools depending on what I’m trying to achieve.

So, without further ado, here’s some thoughts:

Facebook

Perhaps the most popular amongst the people I communicate with, Facebook is where I communicate with my friends – not just FB friends, but actual friends. In fact, FB has allowed me to connect with friends and family I haven’t seen in years and keep with their lives.

It’s also one of the places I promote my own websites, such as this blog, my opinion-based site Edited For Clarity (and its weekly live web show), and my business site SodermanPhoto.com. Most of the stuff you’ll find from me on FB is aggregated from these sites, as well as stuff I see on Twitter or Google+.

Facebook offers me ways to quickly message my friends, plan get-togethers and share news and fun bits I’ve found online. What is is not very good at is long-form posting. If you really want to articulate an idea, FB ain’t the place. The signal-to-noise ratio is far too high. Your post can disappear in the stream in seconds.

Twitter

Twitter is my quick hit news and idea source, as well as a place where I have made many acquaintances and found excellent viewpoints and amazingly talented individuals. But it has it’s limitations.

Unless you are using some type of third-party software (I use Tweetdeck), the signal-to-noise ration can be VERY high. There’s also the limitation of 140 characters per tweet. Some folks just don’t do well with that constraint.

So how do I use it? I tend to post links to good information or retweet good posts by others. It’s a great way to get news and information quickly. But don’t rely on it. Use the links and information you find to do your own looking. But if it is a current event, you might find news there much more quickly than on major news sites.

I also use it to drive traffic to my sites, by posting under their respective Twitter accounts.

Google+

This is the newest of the sites that I use, and the one I have been using the most of late. Part of the reason for that is that I have the most people seeing my submissions. For example, on Facebook, I have about 230 “friends”. On Twitter, I have approximately 1150 “followers”. On Google+, the number of people who have added me to circles (an equivalent of following on Twitter) is more than 6,400. It’s a much bigger audience. So one post there is usually responded to by a much larger number than anywhere else. But where Google+ differs from Twitter is in the length of posts. You can wrote long form posts on Google+ as well as add an image, making the post much closer to a blog post. So items that are not necessarily worthy of doing a full blog post, but need more than just a sentence or two are posted on Google+

Keeping In Sync

So, there are different uses for each of these venues, and then I have my individual blogs. So how do these tie together?

To make things simpler for myself, I use a variety of automation tools to spread things around a bit. For example. posts from this blog (a WordPress installation) are automatically crossposted to my professional Facebook using a plug-in named Wordbooker, as well as tweeted out with a link using another plug-in, Twitter Tools. The same is true on Edited For Clarity, but in that case, the FB posts are posted to the Edited For Clarity FB page and tweeted to the corresponding Twitter account.

Once a post is on FB, I usually share it to my friends, if I think it is appropriate for everyone. In many cases, the Edited For Clarity posts are a bit more political in nature, and I don’t share all of them.

As for Google+, integration there is not yet complete, as there is no easy way yet to post to FB at the same time – it requires an extension (I use Chrome) and an extra post. Integration with Twitter is actually achieved through a third-party website, ManageFlitter, which captures my new Google+ posts and reposts them to Twitter with a link back to Google+

A also use sites like dlvr.it to repost items. Many times, I’ll post something in the morning, but due to the nature of streams in FB and Twitter, they can fly by unnoticed. By using dlvr.it, the items are reposted automatically, without any input from me, reaching a larger audience.

Does it take a little extra work to keep everything in sync? Sure. But it’s also the best way to make sure people see what you want to say.