Day 19 – Which Social Media services provide value?
Yesterday, I discovered via Jason Bean’s blog that Pownce will be deactivated in the next few months. It got me thinking about the various social media services I use and why. Basically, which services provide the most value to me, the user that motivate me to keep using. I decided it was time to write a post about the services that I use most frequently and why.
In a previous post, I wrote about my novice status on Twitter, and it’s not really relevant any more, because I’ve been using it more and more and as I’ve gained more followers I’ve found it to be more and more valuable from a marketing standpoint.
Twitter works for me in two ways. First, I can leverage the people I follow to find out all sorts of interesting things that are happening on the internet and second, I can leverage the people that are following me in order to promote whatever I want to promote. The key to understanding twitter is that the river must flow both ways. I liken it to internet karma. The more you participate in whatever is happening on Twitter, the more success you’ll have in promoting whatever it is you’re passionate about.
Delicious and Digg
Right now, I’m not really participating in any other bookmarking sites besides these two (I know I should really get on stumbleupon too). I use them both differently. I like Digg for finding cool stuff. I really could spend hours searching through everything that people have submitted, because it’s just amazing how much cool stuff is on there. I also submit my own posts from time to time if I think they’re particularly good. Occasionally this will help drive a bit of traffic to my site.
I use Delicious primarily for saving bookmarks. It’s really just a way to help me stay organized so I don’t forget about something cool that I might want to look back on in the future. Occasionally I’ll also use it to share content with people I follow, but it’s not really my primary motivation.
Friendfeed
Friendfeed is a wonderful service that aggregates all your feeds into one place, so if you post something on your blog, or on twitter, or virtually anywhere else, it shows up on Friendfeed. This is really helpful to me for a few reasons
1 – It basically acts as an online log of what I like and what I’m doing. If I want to find a blog post or link or anything that I’ve done I can just look through my friendfeed and find it. The benefit is that it doesn’t take any extra work to accomplish this as it just pulls from whatever feed I tell it to.
2 – I get updates from other people’s feeds, so it helps me find cool stuff that I might not have found otherwise. I generally only subscribe to people that have similar interests to me, so it’s a lot of targeted content that I tend to enjoy.
3 – People can subscribe to my feed and see everything that I’m doing which helps me promote my various interests.
Facebook, LinkedIn, & Plaxo
I’ve grouped these three services together, because they all provide similar benefits. I belong to all three, because there are some differences. Facebook was the first social network that I ever joined. It has really blossomed in the last few years into a very full-featured and comprehensive service. It’s real strength is that it helps you stay connected to a huge number of people. It has more users than any other social network, and it also has more features.
LinkedIn and Plaxo are very similar to each other and I basically use them as a CRM (customer relationship manager). Essentially, if I get a contact’s business card, then connect with them on one of these platforms I can throw the card away because I basically have everything I need within the platform.
There are only so many hours in the day.
Maintaining several social networks can suck a lot of time out of your day, so I’ve found that it’s best to pick a few that offer me the most value and stick to that. Which social networks do you think offer the most bang for your buck?
