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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