Social media is a funny beast. It can be fun, engaging, informative and rather useful at times. At other times it can be a huge time-sink unless you organize your approach to social media to make it an effective tool or option. If you have no business druthers about either Twitter or Facebook, are they worth your time?
I’m primarily looking at Twitter & Facebook since that is where my experiences are mostly based. But I can’t outright say yes or no to my question. After you read my observations and takes on the two, maybe you’ll have a better opinion.
Facebook
Facebook has been a hit & miss for my site. Despite creating a page for the site and following the instructions diligently about providing my RSS feed so that the site FB page updates automatically, it does not. It seems to pick and choose when to update. Hence, I had to visit the Facebook page on and off and manually submit the articles that really interest me. (But with RSS Graffiti, that’s changed and things are looking up for all my Facebook pages.)
What I think is a powerful asset from Facebook is the ability to hook up with family and/or friends.
Facebook, with the appropriate security account settings, can be an awesome tool for staying in touch with family or friends. If that’s your focus, I think FB is 2nd to none in that category. You can use security settings to allow only specific folks to see your updates or you can let the whole world in. I have specific settings that only allow a core group of friends and associates see my updates.
If I want others to see what I’m saying, I can modify the settings on the fly if you want more than your select group to see what you’ve said. I have found this VERY handy over the last year or so. You can group your friends into different categories so it’s easy to check on updates from that category of friends or follows or likes, or you can leave it a hodgepodge.
The strength to FB is that everything is contained therein. Provide a link, add a video or supplying some images does not require the use of a slew of possible options. It’s all self-contained and pretty easy to use.
FB is also a great business tool. You can use links on your own website to point your readers to your FB Page and then they can have updates in their FB page.
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Twitter
Twitter can be a handy tool for website owners. As far as generic users are concerned, it’s a crap shoot.
Twitter does have the ability to break up who you follow into different groups and you can PW protect these groups, so this could be used to stay in touch with the important or intimate family & friends, but you have a 140 character limitation in your communications. Though at times, that’s a blessing if no one decides to abuse it and post 50 messages at once.
Twitter can also be used to follow celebrities and organizations, but there’s a huge disparity between true communications from either of these in the Twitter-verse.
Celebrities:
It’s cool that celebrities are on Twitter. (They’re on Facebook too.) Some use it to send insightful messages, to update their own status’s or to rant. Others are paid handsomely to use it also. It’s a win/win for them. But then there are those that just go on and on and on with meaningless crap. Without disparaging any particular star or “organization,” there were a few that would get on “the Twitter” and go on about their wife, their life and their opinions. Suddenly, my entire Twitter feed is hi-jacked by useless nonsense. It’s a a waste of time trying to filter through their noise, though it’s moments like this that having specific lists without these verbal wanderers can come in handy.
There are those that seem to feel compelled to use Twitter as their profanity base of communication. I am not a stick in the mud… ask my co-workers. I have a sailor’s mouth when something actually gets under my skin. But I’ve never seen the reasoning behind tossing out s* and f* bombs in tweets. It feels rude and I think you need to consider your entire audience when you send out your thoughts to followers and non-followers alike. I think my total tally with cuss words on Twitter is under 10. That’s not bad if you can find all my Twitter feeds and see that I’ve sent out over 25,000 tweets. But there are those that feel compelled to toss out foul language, with no regard for the readership. (Yea, that same individual in the above paragraph had this inclination.)
Balancing Twitter and Facebook
There can be balance or there can be noise. If you are one of those folks that follows several hundred accounts in either, I have to ask what your point is? The noise is endless and you’ll probably miss the good tweets if you have that many accounts you follow.
One of the tricks is to follow the right folks who retweet (RT) the good stuff. I tend to RT stuff I don’t have time to write about but think my readers/followers might be interested in. I’m about informing my readership, not tricking them with sneaky or misleading titles that reek of ‘rag’ newspaper tricks.
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So if you’ve ever been on the bubble about these services, I’d say that Facebook is your best bet. You can restrict access and it has plenty of functionality. Twitter does too, but then you find yourself going outside of Twitter to user other services. Facebook is an all-in-one service.
Is Your Privacy Your Own?
Now, there are the privacy issues with Facebook.
You do have to stay on top of what they do to the services but that isn’t too hard. Right now, I’ve noticed that they have now automatically turned on my CHAT window. No matter how many times I turn it off. It’s not that I don’t want to say hi. It’s only that I’m so busy that I hate detracting from work or from my chats with friends.
But that’s me.
Also, if you’re worried about Facebook, keep in mind that you DO NOT HAVE TO put in your phone number or address. In fact I advise against it.
I advise against it because if you start finding yourself playing around with Facebook and start talking about vacations or checking into locations far from home, you’re pretty much advertising that your home is available for break-ins at this moment, oh, and here’s where I live.
But if you follow minimal security practices, that should not even be an issue. Me? I don’t tweet or post to FB about vacations until after I’m back. It’s a habit.
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So as I’m done writing this, I think I lean towards Facebook. But again, it’s the reason why that matters most. And those are yours to choose! Thanks for checking out this Consumer-Bits opinion piece.
