Myspace and Bebo have been around a long time and have been popular with teenagers. They could blog and share pictures with their friends (and even strangers). This seemed to hold little appeal for adults, we’re already too busy.

Facebook took the blog model and added a twist that appealed to adults. Instead of having to take the time to visit and read everyone’s individual pages, Facebook streams your friends updates into your facebook home page. Updates at a glance and gave the ability to acknowledge it with a thumbs up in one click, or leave a comment in a minute. In a few minutes you can get an overview of what’s happening to people who matter to you.

Social media has made the world seem smaller. With our families spanning the globe, Facebook can be a tool for strong communication, sharing events, sharing photos, videos and playing countless types of games, such as scrabble or bejeweled. You can even become a fan of The Muppets or “The Cold Side of the Pillow”.

Facebook offers many privacy settings for your posted content. If there are things you’d share with your best mates that you might not want your mum to see, it’s not a problem. You can sort your friends into groups and assign your content to be viewed by some of those groups, or not. Spam is well under control, I can’t recall seeing any.

Businesses and organisations can also take advantage of Facebook by creating a Facebook Page (this is not the same as a Facebook Group). By doing this, you can share your page with customers, staff and friends. They can then become Fans of your page and be fed your updates in their page. Their friends could also find your page interesting and become Fans. Pages provide the facilities for targeted advertising, attracting new contacts and engaging them in discussion.

Recent studies are showing that companies using social media have increased their revenue by 18% in the past 12 months. (Source: www.engagementdb.com) It is worth investigating what they are doing to defy the economic woes.

How does “Wiltshire” rank in Facebook search results? 35 Pages, 500+ Groups, and 313 Events posted.

Facebook is a diverse tool, and provides equal opportunities for all entities, with just a bit of effort.

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Selective Twitter Status has made a huge improvement since I last configured it. It now supports adding more than one instance, not a choice for adding to either your profile or a page. You can add one Twitter account for each Page you manage. All you need to do after installing the Facebook App is to add #fb to the end of your tweets when you want it published to Facebook. Incredibly easy and a huge convenience.

Selective Twitter Status by @andyy is one of my favourite tools.

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“NOW TELL ME WHAT THE HELL I’M DOING HERE!”

<chuckles> So what would I tell my friends about Twitter?

If you’re new to Twitter, it’s not obvious what you should be doing. You can search for a few people you know, but then what? The answer to that all depends on what you want to get out of it and would probably help to know what you CAN get out of Twitter. There’s tons of guides how to use it, lots of tools and I’ll suggest some another time, but highly recommend starting at www.mashable.com, and follow @mashable on twitter.

The best thing is to sit back and observe how other people are using it. See who your friends follow, watch how they tweet. Be a lurker. I lurked for weeks until I figured out my place in the Twittersphere.

Reasons to use Twitter on a personal level:

• Keep up with your friends and family – it’s like Facebook’s status stream, you can link to the websites you’re looking at, tweet your blog updates, share pics/video and more
• Follow the news – there are some great news sources on twitter, you get the headlines and breaking stories
• Discuss your hobbies and passions – use twitter search or twazzup.com to find like minded people, #cooking, #gardening, #politics, #gaming, #films, #travel, local events…
• Follow celebrities and see what they’re up to – @stephenfry, @johnstamos, @kevinspacey, you’d be surprised who’s tweeting
• Join a club or start a club of your own

Tweeting for a club, group or business?

I strongly suggest setting up Twitter boundries once you’ve begun getting the hang of it. Create a separate account for personal use, each business, site and clubs. There’s no limit. I have one for personal, business, and one for each other projects, totalling 4 active at the moment. When using the business account, be professional. There are many examples of businesses who really screw up via twitter.

Business uses for twitter:

• engaging with customers and networking
• follow industry news sources, discuss and retweet
• tweeting your own news and links to new site content
• building a following of potential new customers
• promoting your website and building targetted traffic

Again, when you get the hang of Twitter, you might want to get a Twitter client that handles multiple accounts so you can post from your desktop or mobile phone. It gets a bit much to try to remember which account you’re logged into. Later, I’ll review some timesaving tools and shortcuts I use.

Experiment and have fun!

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