The Perfect Social Media Trifecta: Have you found yours?
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009I have. And it feels as comfortable as an old piece of new media. (Well, you know what I mean.) So here’s what I call my social media network trifecta and what I think you can get out of each of these three venues. (Because I keep getting asked “what do you get out of those three venues?”)
In particular order:
Facebook: Personal Connections
MYTH: All people post is stupid stuff about baking cupcakes, I don’t care about those kinds of things.
FACT: I have never posted about baking cupcakes on facebook. (No matter that I don’t bake.)
BENEFITS: “What’s in it for you?”
• Connect with friends you can’t find time to talk with more often because life is so crazy busy
• Reconnect with old friends you didn’t realize how much you missed
facebook login page
• Find out what all of your friends are up to without having to get on the phone (because who of us has time to get on the phone “just to chat” when you’re over 30)?
• Share life/work happenings that are interesting, but would otherwise not warrant an immediate phone call or email to one (let alone all) of your friends. Example? “You’re leaving tomorrow for a biz trip to Okinawa.” Or “you just found out you’re pregnant with your 5th child.” These “status updates” are unequivocally interesting and each are likely to illicit some feedback from your friends, like, “watch out for the poisonous Habu snake” or “haven’t you two figured out how babies are made yet?”
• It’s fun. And I say this as a longstanding, regionally renowned, anti-social curmudgeon. It’s been great to have quick and easy chats with people that matter to me with whom I would not otherwise have been able to manage keeping up with due to the business of life. It connects you with your “inner circle” of friends AND your “outer circle,” too, in a highly efficient way: you can just listen in or join in the conversation. Either way, you remember how many lives intersect with yours and it turns out that’s pretty cool. (Though I’d prefer you didn’t mention I ever said something so blatantly uncurmudgeonly.)
LinkedIn: Professional Connections
MYTH: People just like to show off how many people they know.
FACT: Some people, maybe. Others are simply what you might call “power users.” But the truth is, in my opinion, most people really just want to bring all of their professional connections under one, easy-to-reference, access-from-anywhere roof.
BENEFITS: “What’s in it for you?”
• It’s EASY. Easy, easy, easy. This one is a no-brainer, I swear. If you can send email, you can set up your Linked In Profile lickety-split.
• It’s low-maintenance. You don’t need to be a power user. You don’t need to “update your status” daily (or at all, for that matter). You can set up your profile and chill. Your local network will build itself organically. I guarantee it. Once your network grows, you may want to revisit your profile for a good spit-polish every now and again.
Click here to vote in my LinkedIn poll
• It’s like having a web-based, open-access digital rolodex. LinkedIn is a great tool for keeping up with other professionals with whom you might otherwise lose track of over the years. You may also be surprised to see the people you and your own contacts know in common in your local network.
• It’s an at-a-glance resume. Think of it as a resume that is easy to maintain and will get a lot more traffic than the one you have to type up and perfect when you’re looking for a new job or a job change. This gives you a nice, easy-access “backup” resume, one that’s always current and ready to go.
• It keeps you top of mind. As people dip in and out of their contact lists on LinkedIn, your name is going to pop up. When you add a new contact, your name pops up. If you join a group and make your involvement public, your name will pop up. As a matter of fact, if you do end up joining any of the Linked In groups, you might find yourself engaging in conversations with other professionals outside of your “firsthand” network, thus building a whole new set of connections and a more “robust” network. Me? I’ve made some nice linkups with people (I did not previously know) from my college alumni group. Probably wouldn’t have otherwise met them. So I think that’s pretty solid networking in action.
• LinkedIn Apps. If you want to go really crazy and pimp your Linked In profile, you can incorporate some of Linked In’s applications that enable you to display your blog feed, post a poll or showcase your slideshare presentations, among other things. There’s more, but that’s all I have to say about that at the moment. The apps are relatively new as of this writing and I’m still playing around with them.
Twitter: The Personal-Professional Connection Conduit
MYTH: “I have nothing to tweet about.”
FACT: Sure you do. You know something about something. Tweet that.
BENEFITS: “What’s in it for you?”
• Speed-networking. Yes, twitter is like a networking function that takes place in the backseat of a Formula 1 race car. Gazillions of conversations happening in 140 characters or less. The twitterstream flows fast, but that doesn’t mean you’ll drown.
My Twitter Homepage
• Options. Here’s one example of how it works: you get an email that so-and-so “username” is following you on twitter; you click the link and go to username’s twitter page; you look for a real name behind “username;” you read username’s bio (a whopping 160 characters); you thank username for the follow via DM (the “direct message” function in twitter); you decide if you would like to follow username back; you click “follow” if you’re so inclined; you’ll now see username’s tweets in your twitterstream… and usename, will thus, see yours, if you chose to followback, of course. It’s that easy to “meet” someone and that easy to “move on” if a followback doesn’t feel appropriate for you. Personally, I also always glance at the person’s list of tweets to see if username is a “broadcaster” or a “converser.” If you don’t see any @other_username tweets, (tweets directed at another username), then they’re just broadcasting which I find to be less useful, generally speaking.
• Web traffic. Twitter also provides the option of including your web site in your profile. This can work to generate traffic to your blog or corporate site that you might not otherwise attract. You can also occasionally (and not spammingly) promote your accomplishments (again, sparingly) which could drive traffic back to your blog or your business.
• Retweetability. Okay, this is pretty cool. When you see an “RT” at the front of a tweet, that’s called a “ReTweet.” This is when you read the tweet of someone you are following and think it’s so great that you want to share it with your twitter followers. So you RT it. Now imagine if you tweet something and someone else RT’s it. Think about how far your tweet could go! And this all happens with a velocity behind it you won’t find anywhere else. It’s Word of Mouth (WOM), done RT-style.
• New Tweeps. Again, I am anti-social. So don’t think it’s because I’m some kind of impassioned extrovert that I say this…but you can actually “make friends” on twitter. That’s right. AND, you can make them, as I’ve pointed out, faster than in most other venues. This is a forum like no other. A party where you make your rounds repeatedly (or “retweetedly,” you might say) in only 10-15 minutes a day (if you’re disciplined). [NOTE: To make this opportunity work at its best, I highly recommend Tweetdeck and Tweetbeep as key support services to help you enhance your twitter experience. There are many others, as well. But these two are essential, in my opinion.)
• The Twappetizer Effect. (Twitter Appetizer, I’m herein creating the term.) Because I love food, I’ll make it the center of my analogy:
Twitter is like a conversation appetizer. You may then decide to make an entree out of the conversation and move it on over to Linked In, giving your connection more substance. And for dessert, you might decide to move your connection and your conversation on over to facebook where you may see each other more often and in a definitively more relaxed light. THIS is what makes twitter such a great connection builder. If birds of a feather, flock together, they all probably met on twitter first.
So that’s it. There you have it. That’s my perfect social media trifecta. A perfect balance of engagement venues, each perfect in its own right and even more perfect in triplicate.
Now I ask you, (“tri” as I may to get you all to quit being so shy and leave a comment already), if you had to keep it to three, what’s your social media network trifecta?
