Thursday 24 June 2010

No friends, feeling lonely?

Yes, that's a depressed and lonely looking Keanu Reeves on a park bench in NYC- and while his agents at CAA insist he's fine, June 15th marked the first annual Cheer Up Keanu Day, a truly 21st century social media phenomena (see here and here if you're curious).

But you don't have to be a Hollywood film star to feel a bit gloomy if you don't have as many friends as you think you should.  According to Sysomos, half of all Twitter users are following less than 10 "friends", while 63% have fewer than 10 followers... making for a rather lonely Twitter experience. 


I'll write about the quest of attracting followers another time,but I think for many people one of the biggest obstacles to getting started properly on Twitter is finding other people to follow - and be followed by.   The suggestion categories Twitter offers are way too vague and broad, and the search function isn't as good as it could be.  The best  - and almost only place to start - is via the Find Friends function, which looks through your email contacts list to see if anyone you know is already on Twitter. That's great for personal contacts you keep on Gmail or Yahoo, slightly less good if your contacts are all locked up on work Outlook....


The good news for budding Tweeters  - particularly those of us tweeting for business reasons - is that as of yesterday, you can now ask Twitter (via the Find Friends tab) to automatically search your LinkedIn contacts to find relevant and interesting people to follow.   

And if you're business-Tweeter and aren't deterred by my previous post about Facebook, Twitter also has an app to find out which of your Facebook friends are tweeting.

Happy friending!
 

To Facebook or not to Facebook

Following a bruising meeting with my accountant this morning (scolded for being too detailed on some things and not even nearly detailed enough on other: sent back to try again....), am spending the rest of the day tied to my desk, sorting out some loose ends with my own social media presence on the internet.   Have reinvented www.beaglethinking.com as a Modernista-type site where social media does all the talking: drawing feeds from here (Blogger), Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and so on.    This requires quite a bit of tidying up...although quite doable because I'll be leaving Facebook out of the equation. 

Why?  One, (controversial perhaps), I'm just not convinced Facebook is a place to do business - certainly not B2B, B2G or G2G, but even the big brands are struggling to talk authentically and usefully to their consumers on Facebook.    Two, I think we need boundaries between our personal and our work lives.  I'm all in favour of building good personal connections with our business contacts - and there's no rule that says you can't let your personality show in your professional blog or Twitter feed - but too much information  (dodgy holiday snaps in Speedos, anyone?) can definitely get in the way..     
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