End in the end, it will all just be an interesting chapter in web history — but, for now, when big Twitter changes come…what will it bring? — Okay, enough setup…here’s the meat of it.

Twitter is changing. We may not like it but it’s happening. So what will it mean? Well it’s very possible that a flatening may be occuring.

What I mean is this…
Much of what has made Twitter so significant has be that it’s been a democratic platform. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Anyone can follow… You get the idea.

It’s also been less then impressively profitable for the founders given it’s global (and relationally…instantaneous) proliferation and impact. Only Facebook has seen faster numbers of adoption.

It’s been interesting to watch as Facebook makes moderate to serious changes to their platform on practically a seasonal basis, while Twitter has remained, largely unchanged in comparison.

Facebook has managed to piss off millions upon millions of people simultaneously. — Simultaneously! And on many occassions. Twitter’s community, on the other hand, is significantly smaller, but in many ways more loyal to the brand.

Facebook has become the social network of convenience. While Twitter is largely untapped. Which is why I think it might be wise for the powers that be at Twitter to continue to make changes slowly. We’ve seen what happens when you change something emotionally charged for millions of people. Massive trust is lost.

Now is an opportunity for Twitter, but if they go about changing too much too fast, I’m afraid they may leave some of their audience behind as well. Or at least their trust and loyalty.

Here are a few ways I’ve discovered to find the peeps that you’d most like to follow.

For the newbies: (you can probably skip this part)

• Follow some of your Gmail contacts. If you didn’t do this when you started your Twitter account, you can do that here.
• See who they are following. You’ll usually find more friends in your circles this way; often people you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Tweet about topics that you want to connect with others on. People want to connect with others on similar topics and with people who share their same basic attitudes that they themselves possess.  So tweet!

Once the training wheels are off:

• Browse Listorious for who is listed in the topics that interest you. Follow whole lists or just people.
• Run some simple Twitter searches for the more obscure terms that interest you (perhaps kayaking San Diego)
• Explore who is on lists that were made by those who you already follow or who you find to be interesting or influential.
• Follow insightful, funny or interesting commenters on blogs that you read.
• Explore some influencial tweep’s favorited tweets (such as Scobleizer’s favorites) for interesting twitterers to follow.

Ninja skills:

• Twiangulate some of the peeps you already follow to see who they commonly follow.
• Use a free service called RSSFriends to watch who certain tweeps follow.  You can then decide if they are someone you’d also like to follow.
• Find tweeps using Tweepz, a site that allows you to search by bio, name and location — and to sort those results based on follower/following counts, language and more. You can even combine search metrics, like this search which uses both the bio search terms “twitter addict” and the location search term “san diego”.
• Run a specialized Google search to find people on Twitter by words used in their name/username or their bio (example “work at Google“).
• When you meet interesting people in real life, ask if they Twitter.  It really doesn’t have to be “weird”.
• Engage in interesting conversations and be useful to those who follow you.  Don’t be spammy.
  (I know that this isn’t really advanced, but you’ll know why it’s listed here)

For every technique I’ve listed here, I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed. Why not add to the conversation by adding your peep-finding strategies in the comments?  Be sure to leave your Twitter handle for others to find you.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it below.  For more on using Twitter for business subscribe to this blog or follow on Twitter

So I started to write about a related topic and the keyboard revolted. Or maybe it was my fingers.

In any case this post about “which are my favorite Twitter clients and why” pretty much wrote itself.  It’ll be useful for you if you are looking to reduce confusion or streamline your interactions on Twitter.

What is a Twitter client and why do I care?
The best user experience for Twitter is generally achieved using a Twitter client, an application that acts as an intermediary between you and Twitter and does some of your bidding; or at least makes the experience easier and more enjoyable.  Twitter clients also tend to make engaging on Twitter more feature-rich and faster than if you were to engage simply using the web interface.

My favorite Twitter clients and why they’re worth your time
On my Mac I use Tweetdeck.  It’s powerful, customizable and I find that it keeps me in the conversation.  It can however be overwhelming if you have many columns and haven’t customized the notifications to only alert you of the high priority items, like your @ mentions and lists you like to keep a close eye on.  If you need help doing this leave a comment on the blog here and I’ll help you out.

I also use Tweetdeck on the iPhone but strictly for the lists functionality.  I use it to stay up on my local peeps as well as lists I follow for news and happenings in the spaces that concern me.

Tweetie for iPhone has been for a long time my absolute favorite iPhone Twitter app.  It’s really great for accessing my main Twitter home feed and responding quickly to peeps I see there.  It’s highly intuitive and pretty fast.  Where the performance begins to break down is with lists.  Which is exactly why I use Tweetdeck for lists.  Tweetie is just too slow in this regard.  For most everything else it’s great though.

Hootsuite is good if you have a need to schedule individual tweets. Like for example, you have a thought or find some news at 11:20pm when you know that nobody will see it if you share, so instead with Hootsuite you can share it at a later time.  Just select ‘send later’ and choose the day and time you’d like it sent.  This functionality is available on both the iPhone app and the web app.

Tap 11 is my new shiny object as Twitter clients go.  I’m an analytics guy.  I get my kicks from stats and from drawing actionable conclusions from patterns.  If you like to track things too, you might like Tap 11.  In addition to being a more than decent Twitter client, it offers the added ability to view charts and stats about all manner of things you can geek out on.  It is still in private beta though, so you’ll need to request access.

What are your favorite clients and why? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks for reading.  ;-]

-@JoshuaGuffey (whispers: “follow, follow”)

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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/evablue

You know you want one!

Now adding a Facebook button to your WordPress hosted site is as simple as installing a new plugin.

A bit ago I posted about adding a Facebook ‘like’ button to your posts.  The process was a bit janky since no developers had yet released any WordPress plugins to accomplish this task.  Now there are about a jillion plugins to accomplish this. Hooray!

I looked over several of them and settled on WP Facebook Like. I certainly didn’t test them all, so there may be a few out there that have some extra bells and whistles, but this one seemed solid, so I’m giving it a go.

The nice thing about adding this to your posts is that as people visit and ‘like’ your stuff, that shows up in their ‘recent activity’ stream, which is nice if your trying to use social media for business.

To install it:
Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin and search for “wp facebook like”.  Click the install button.  It’s that easy.

Like I said, there are several, so if you’re trying to get this exact one, be sure that you’re not installing some variation on this name.  The most notable of which simply adds the word “button” (ie. “wp facebook like button”).

By default you’ll see the button on all posts after the post content.  some users may want to have the option to exclude the button from certain posts or enable it manually only when desired, and I’m sure either a later version of this plugin or a different one currently available will offer this, but that wasn’t important to me.

So far I like it a lot.  It’s simple. It works. Tada!  (try it out below)

[note: If you're using WordPress version 2.9.2 or earlier it seems you'll need to select "iframe" as the embedding method. The default of "xfbml" works fine on WordPress 3.0 beta-1.]

For more ways to implement social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

Essentially what this means is that Facebook has now made it possible to not only integrate elements of it’s interface, such as the ‘like’ button, into everywhere you go on the web; they’ve made it possible for you to bring the Facebook experience and your friends along with you wherever you go.

This also makes it possible to navigate the web as YOU; being served up web pages that are tailored specifically to your ‘likes’ from across the web.

Some of what this means now:

• Implementation of Facebook features across the web very rapidly.
• See what your friends like on websites all across the web.
• Ability to essentially be connected to your Facebook friends all the time across the entire web.
• Facebook becomes the hub for your ‘likes’ and those of the rest of the world.
• Share documents with friends via docs.com (a direct attack on Google Docs)

What we may see in the near-term future:

• Social search further threatens Google.  Facebook and Microsoft are working together so there may be some further implementation into Bing in the future.
• Expect advertisers to start to take into consideration your ‘likes’ from across the entire web and display customized ads on the pages you’re currently viewing.  This may position Facebook further as the most targeted advertising platform available. Imagine Google Adsense ads being replaced by Facebook ad panels.  This won’t happen immediately since data needs to be gather and frameworks implemented…but expect something like this to emerge.
• Increased competition for the web’s social default.  I’m thinking Google may jump in with their Gmail-based, relatively untapped, Buzz, however I’m unsure how well this would take hold.  The ideal would be an open source platform that keeps competition going, such as some implementation of XAuth.  Xauth isn’t ready (or even designed) for this type of use, but I’m still holding out hope for an open source, social web.
• This could further position Facebook as the go to location for data to fuel the emerging Social CRM trend.
• Third-party tools for accessing and manipulating Facebook’s open graph data in useful and meaningful ways.  Much like the third-party explosion of applications we’ve seen for Twitter.

Further thinking on how ‘open graph’ changes the game

This effects a lot of the web (basically all of it) and the many of the major players in the game.

First, it’s an attack on Google’s reining web-dominance.  As the web and search becomes increasingly social these two giants are pushing forward into this ever overlapping arena.  Google currently wields a tremendous amount of data about our web use and the information from its suite of services for organizing and managing our lives .  While Facebook seeks to be the hub of our likes and interest and seeks to make our daily web activities more social and personalized.

Facebook has now made itself essentially as open as Twitter while at the same time distributing itself across the web via the developer’s ability to embed certain Facebook interfaces into non-Facebook pages.  They’re counting on the rest of the web community to use this as the new standard and they seem to have significant forward motion in that direction.

Still, this poses the problem of disgruntled users who had come to expect the privacy the Facebook used to tout as central to their policy.  In March of 2008 Zuckerman, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, said “If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users”; this clearly isn’t their policy anymore.

Google could perhaps implement a similar system which enables a personalized web experience without Facebook’s vision of complete social integration; and perhaps offers a more low-key way of sharing, connecting and collaborating with friends online.

How do you expect these new changes to effect the way we use the web? Leave a comment below to voice your thoughts.

For more about social media for business or just to connect follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

There are a number of interesting considerations to be made about timing with social media marketing, depending of course upon the intention of your tweets.

Ideally, if you’re using social media for the purposes of personal branding, promotion or other communication with your people, you’re also actually being social. It’s what makes it fun, connected and gives people a reason to pay attention. But that’s for another post.

How can you be more sure that the people you serve are able to benefit most from your, let’s face it, tiny, 140 charater messages?  Just broadly, I’ll give a few recommendations. These will shift depending on your specific demographics and goals, but it’s a jumping off point.

1. Promotional tweets (or Facebook messages) should be sent at times when your target market is present in that social space. Give some thought to this and if you aren’t there yourself during those times to do the posting, consider a scheduling service. Hootsuite offers a free service that includes scheduling as does SocialPing (still in private beta).

2. Think about the content of your message and if it is appropriate for that time of day. For example, if you sell pizza and you’re running a 2-for-1 special, when do you suppose you’ll get your greatest return on tweets promoting the offer?

My guess as to a good approach (mind you I haven’t done any pizza-lover research outside of consulting my stomach) — I’d think about tweeting about it once around 4:45-5:30 (when people are leaving work or just left work), then around 7:00-7:30 mention it again in a different way (avoid I’m a robot syndrome). I’d also tweet something social or fun once or twice in between the two promo tweets. You don’t want to have your profile filled with promo tweet after promo tweet.

3. It’s also highly useful to align yourself and your message around what is relavant with current trends. And sometimes to have fun heading in the opposite direction from how others are doing it.

We want to be relevant with the current happenings in the world (seasons, holidays and even events with large media coverage or anything really high profile) but ideally to do so in a way that sets us apart from the rest.

A great example of this was a ski resort commercial I heard on the radio not long ago. They were promoting their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like, but they did it completely differently and hit their target market square on the head.

The commercial was with the usual absurdly-booming voice declaring that they were now on “Twitbook” and “Faceplant”. It was a riduclous commercial and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don’t snowboard or ski, so I didn’t go look em up; but I guarantee if I were into snow sports I’d have been there following them.

So this all relates to timing in that social media is now widely accepted as a marketing channel and promoted everywhere. But the message gets stale. Their ad was on target and also refreshing change from the usual “become a fan on Facebook”.

Can you think in different ways about your timing? Are there areas that could be improved? And what can you add to this conversation?

For more ways to think outside-of-the-box about social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

A while back I wrote a post entitled “Don’t follow us on Twitter” that was intended to get a conversation going about how we use Twitter, whom we follow & how we make that choice. I got several comments that helped me to view this topic more broadly. Thanks to those who commented.

I’ve got another thought for you on the topic of whom we follow on Twitter, and it’s thanks to my conversations with you.

It occurs to me that this is a very individual decision. People engage on Twitter for a spectrum of reasons ranging from purely personal to strictly business; it looks different for everyone.  Some just drop links from their blog. Others exclusively use Twitter to engage in casual conversations.  Many share links to things that are happening in their areas of interest or in their industry.  And a few of us have begun contacting companies for quick feedback and questions about their services.

The uses for Twitter are as varied as those using it. And your purpose for engaging on the service certainly dictates the manner in which you use it.

All of this also leaves out the manner in which you filter tweets, if at all.

Obviously, as your network increases in size with active twitterers, your stream will grow. If you are using Twitter for more than casual conversations (and even if you aren’t) you may want to employ some type of filtering so that you can focus on one group of connections at a time.

There are many ways to filter incoming tweets and as you ‘get bigger’ the methods you employ must naturally scale to enable you to continue to function at a high level. (if that is your goal)

You could choose to follow liberally and ‘see what shows up’ on your Twitter stream; or you could choose not to follow anyone but instead to use lists, groups or third-party services to engage where the action and interest is for you.  Most people will likely find their own follow style somewhere in the middle of these extremes.

Regarding this ‘to follow, or not to follow’ dilemma I’d like to share what seems sure to me.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

Three things seem sure to me:

1. That there’s no “right” way to make this choice; we all make it our own way.
2. You shouldn’t feel obligated to ‘follow back’ just because someone followed you.
3. And that “your way” may likely change over time, as all things do.

So go forth!  Follow who you will.  And don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing it wrong; least of all me.

What’s your follow style? Leave me a comment and let me know.

For more about Twitter and ways to filter the incoming data stream that is today’s web, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

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photo credit: Wallula Junction

So I was thinking today that I’d really like the ability to tag my tweeps. I mean seperately from how lists work. In fact, sort of backward from how lists work.

Here’s what I mean:
I recently followed a mobile app developer. I know because he has it listed on his Twitter bio. But what about in three months when I realize I need to talk with a mobile app developer?

I’m not going to look at everyone’s profile whom I follow. And if he isn’t very active on Twitter or on at different times than I am, I may not really have him on my radar.

I don’t have other mobile app developers that I follow so I’m not going to create and manage a list for just one person.

So how do I find him?

I could tweet to ask if there are any, but he may not see it.

I could search all of Twitter for people with ‘mobile app’ in their bio, but what if I really liked his approach and specifically want to try to work with this guy? Besides, it’s possible that he’s changed his bio.

What I’d like is the ability to assign free form tags to any tweep I follow. Tags are different than lists so I’d get a different type of value from them. Tags are more flexible and have a lower maintainence cost. (I don’t know if this is an established term but it fits).

I want to tag tweeps more freely than I feel compelled to use lists. Lists seem cumbersome. Heavy. If you use Tweetie for iPhone, you feel this when you go to view your lists; they take a looong time to be retrieved from the server.

Perhaps tags wouldn’t be much different in this regard, but certainly they’d add a flexibility that I’m just not feeling with lists.

Are there already third-party solutions for this that I don’t know about?

Would you use this feature if Twitter added it? Your thoughts?

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Photo credit: pumpkincat210

The service will capture any type of multimedia; such as pictures, video, audio and text and will ‘place’ this content in a physical location by linking it to GPS coordinates for others to view and interact with.

The company presented at the Mobilize 2008 Conference [video here].  At the conference they discussed how you will have the ability, with your mobile device, to create ‘persistent media’ which will remain tied to that location for others to view and even reply to.  This could transform the way we interact with venues around our home towns, help us to meet interesting people in our area, learn more about our environment and share relevant information about any place any time.  Think of it as writing on an ‘invisible’ wall, anywhere.

It’s a compelling idea that opens up a lot of possibilities.

You could post pictures of concerts, leave messages in places you know that your friends frequent or play location-based geotagging games.  Businesses could keep tabs on what sorts of activities are taking place local to their business and adjust their offerings or other aspects of their business to make better use of this information.  There are a million uses for adding an informational media layer to our existing experience. Not to mention that it’d be loads of fun!

In their presentation the co-founder, Dean Terry, mentions that there’s even a ‘secret message’ function so that you could leave a message at a specific location for someone.  When that person visits that location they receive their message.  This immediately makes me think of leaving digital love notes for my wife, but I’m sure you could think of some less nauseating examples.

I actually see services such as Placethings as poised to become more popular than the check-in trend happening right now with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Buzz and the like.  Without going to far down the rabbit hole, my thinking on this is that check-ins are real-time; and for location-based services this could be a problem since it’s kinda like saying “I’m not home, please rob me“.  All of these services could likely do well to have a delay built into them for safety.

As for Placethings, I cannot say if it is real-time (likely it is) but the shift of focus from geotagging as person-centric to location-and-media-centric may be a healthy direction to take things.

What uses would you find for this? How would you use it or like to see it used?

I didn’t mean “what’s missing from the service?” I meant “what’s missing from my use of it?”

Today I asked a question about car seats and received a reply from three blogger moms that I follow within five minutes.  The responses were useful and nearly instantaneous.  Amazing!  Amazing and yet this happens every day on Twitter.  And to be fair, it happened on Facebook too when I got advice on the same topic from some moms that I know offline and stay up with via Facebook.  Since Facebook is still a sort of a closed system and the ladies aren’t really promoting themselves, I’m not going to list them here.

All of this gets me thinking.  Everyday.

What’s most amazing to me about platforms like Twitter is that I’m meeting intelligent, funny and talented people whom I would likely never meet otherwise. Very often these people are very apt to provide assistance in their areas of interest or expertise.

The service is also transforming the application of customer-centric service, primarily for companies that do not have a brick and mortar business model.  Tonight I sent this tweet to Timebridge and received a reply within the hour (after hours).

I’m learning a lot on Twitter every day; about a variety of topics of interest to me: tech trends, mobile computing, location-based shifts taking place in the social media space, web design, festivals I should be going to and a whole barrage of things that lift my skirt.  I’m connecting with a real community and even learning a few things about human interactions.  And I share the best of this stuff out to those following me.

What sorts of experiences have you had like this?  Leave a comment on the blog to add to this discussion.

“If you follow out of obligation, you’ve not helped anyone.”

Here’s my argument for this:
Does following someone who tweets primarily about fly fishing in Alaska really create meaningful connections. Does it help you to stay current in your field? Who are you actually benefiting if you follow out of obligation?

I would argue that the power of a network is not merely in it’s numbers, but also in its loyalty and its relevance to a central idea, pasison or value-set.

If I have a number of regular tweeps in my stream who actively tweet things that have no relevance to me they gain nothing. Not only that, but I’m now not seeing a more relevant tweet for every one one that ISN’T relevant to me. That sucks.

Furthermore, I’m following out of obligation and am annoyed by their six hundredth tweet about Alaskan bass. A negativite emotionality may develop with them and the whole of the Twitter platform as a result. If my irritation prevents or delay my participation on the network, the entire network potentially looses out from my absence.

Yeah, I’m that crazy.

Meanwhile all this same stuff is going on for the other party too. They can’t unfollow you because they’re afraid that you’ll unfollow them and end their world. Or loose a sale, whichever comes first.

Anyway. We all loose. Nobody wins. Just follow what’s relavant. The end.

And be sure you don’t follow me on ‘the Twitter’ at @JoshuaGuffey

Your thoughts?

You can make lists for anything.  I also have one for health and wellness and one for funny tweeps.  They each only have one tweep right now, but again…that’ll change.  The nice thing is that you can follow other people’s lists if they’ve made them into public lists.

You can follow my Twitter lists above by clicking on the associated links.  Or you can follow me on Twitter and see what I have to say.

What good uses can you think of for Twitter lists?

So what’s the problem??? — Relevance!

Is the data relevant for you in this moment? If you work in the tech world or even (and especially) in the social media space, it’s pretty likely that managing all of your connections  and non-stop, real-time data can be a major undertaking.

Twitter and Facebook have provided us with some basic tools for managing our data streams, but they are still relatively rudimentary and require us to manually categorize our connections by placing them, one-at-a-time into lists or groups of contacts.

I haven’t yet seen anything that goes beyond this level of sophistication for segmenting and filtering out, in real-time, data based on RELEVANCE and not merely upon the source of the data.

Hashtags and Twitter Search begin this process but there are some issues with these tools.

Hashtags are not used by everyone and therefore lose relevance as a tool since important information may not be tagged in a way that brings it to your attention.

An advanced Twitter Search can turn up some pretty relevant data in real-time; and some fancy RSS feed action can make this data more useful, but this tends to cast a wide net and still requires some significant wading to find the data that is most relevant for you. You can build some very specific searches that turn up more targeted data but this also typically filters out some terms you may not have thought of and ends up in a multitude of Twitter search RSS feeds to manage.

If this all sounds like a hell of a lot of work…that’s because it is.

As more of the world adopts Twitter, Buzz and other real-time data sharing technologies, we will have more people connecting with us, and hence, a bigger challenge then we’ve ever seen in trying to read more of what helps move us to forward and less of what doesn’t.

Social media isn’t going away. So how can we stay on top of our game? Well right now you can geek out and plug some Twitter search feeds into Google Reader and you’ll find your reader full of interesting things.  But it takes a special type of geek to even consider playing around with this level of “real-time, data-piping architecture”.

So what do the rest of us do?
I have a few ideas that may help moving forward.

Redundant tweet filtration

It’s my guess if you’ve read this far, that you know a lot of people on Twitter, many of which re-tweet and share the same articles. How many times do you really need to read a tweet about Google’s new policy change? Tweets that share the same links or information could be filtered out or downplayed to make room for unique information.

Real-time tweet relevance filtration

Google certainly has the advantage in this area.  In fact this technology is already in place in Google’s own search engine in the form of suggested search queries.  And even more robustly in the keyword selection tool for their ad network, Google Adwords.

The system knows what words and phrases are generally synonymous or in some way related. On Google.com the technology returns the most popular search terms based on the search habits of entire populations.  Imagine though if your tweet stream (tweets from those you follow) were filtered by relevance to your interests and even the specifics of your current project.  This reality isn’t far for Google.

Better collaborative spam filtration

Perhaps unfortunately for Twitter, Google has a clear lead here again. Gmail has provided a surprisingly spam resistant email experience based upon the ability to block spam message across the entire network given the input of the community it serves, Gmail users.

Yet over at Twitter, auto DMs haunt Twitter like an over-friendly neighbor with bad hygiene. Much of it outright offensive spam that has NO basis on any relationship with you or specific interest of yours as a prospective customer. [dramatic rant]

Google has always been about relevance and “organizing the world’s information”.   Given their ability to provide content in a relevance-centric fashion, I see potential for Google to truly move into social media in an even bigger way in the coming future when there is a potential for more noise in the social space.

Written by Joshua Guffey.  You can follow me on Twitter: @JoshuaGuffey

What do you have to say about this?
How else can we mere mortals manage to keep up with the increasing influx of information?  How  do you think the playing field will change in the next 6-12 months?

To fix this go to:
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=friends_share

Social Network Connections

When you’re new to Social Networks
If you’re getting started in social media from a business standpoint you may feel inclined to join Facebook, Twitter and every other social network you find and become active on each. This impulse is good and I would argue that doing so will help you to stay current, relevant and accessible for your customers and in your industry; however, I would offer a few words of caution and some direction for what may not yet have revealed itself to be an rather ambitious task.

“So I put up my profile and friend a bunch of people?”

Uh, no.

Consider that each of these networks are really new forms of communication. They go both ways. Yes they are powerful. Yes you could get great exposure. And yes they can even be fun ways of growing your business. But remember, if you are to use them effectively, they are also work. I know many of you shuddered just reading that. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Think about it…every new network is a new point of contact, a new ’inbox’ to manage. And each social network comes with it’s own technical learning curve. So without totally frightening you away from social media as a new channel for communication between you, your current and potential clients and your industry as a whole, I’d like to offer a few suggestions about how to begin; because I do believe that in most cases the benefits outway the hurdles.

Focus your social efforts

Don’t try to learn more than one major social network at once. Give yourself enough time to learn one well enough to maintain it and to move forward with it before you take on another. This may be a month or two for you or it may be a longer or shorter process. You’ll know when you’ve got it handled. You’ll be engaged and responsive on that network. You’ll be in relevant conversations and you’ll be expanding your connections all the time.  Just don’t be ‘that guy’.

Engaging in multiple social networks simultaneously can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you’re just learning the ‘social ropes’. There’s a new language to learn, etiquette to grasp and mental bandwith to appropriate.

Here I’m mostly referring to Facebook and Twitter. Yes they’re both very big, very busy and potentially a great place for you to setup and begin building a reputation, a sense of ‘authority’ (I’m not super fond of this term as it seems to be used frequently in a matter as to suggest deception or subverting the natural process of becoming recognized in a giving space, but you get the point) and also a sense of connection with an interested community. Notice I didn’t say audience; that isn’t what social media is about. It’s about actual interaction. Forget that and you’re in trouble.

I would go ahead and grab your username at each major site so as to secure brand integrity, but I wouldn’t actually become active on each until I’m ready to integrate a new inbox and a new community of individuals into my social media efforts.

I know that I just got finished saying essentially “don’t do this unless you’re going to do it right” and now I seem to be contradicting myself, but there’s actually a really simple solution. What I would suggest is that on whichever social networks you’ve decided are less relevant for your intial social media expansion (more on this in another post) simply make a statement that tell people where you ARE focused right now.

Your “Sorry, I’m out” message

It may read something like this:

“Thank you for visiting me (or your business name) on Facebook. It’s important to me that I’m able to respond to you so I’m choosing to focus only on Twitter at this time. I’d love to connect with you there (I’m @JoshuaGuffey) or feel free to send me an email. Thank you!”

It doesn’t have to be long, elaborate or particularly elequant. Just tell them what’s up and where to find you and express an honest
appreciation. I’ll get more into choosing a network to focus on later. Until then, you can go grab your name in the places you think you might setup shop and write a little blurb directing people to somewhere to connect. Even if that’s just email address or blog. At least you’re being straight-forward and making an effort.

Add your thoughts!
I’m sure there are important points that I missed.  What would you like to add to the comments section?

photo credit: marc_smith