Being social with Social media

Using social media socially goes beyond becoming familiar with Twitter, however.  Another step in increasing effectiveness in social media use is to face the Facebook monster.  A social networking site that started out just connecting college students (in 2004) has since become available to the public, and oriented itself more towards advertisement revenue and marketing.  This new constituency inevitably changes the content and quality of content users can find on Facebook's loved and hated news feed feature.  Much like Twitter, Facebook's feed - the prominent feature on its home page as of last year - has an impossible amount of information on it; there is no way a user can possibly keep up with its real time updates coming in from around the world.

Facebook's feed has been accused of being evidence of a "sell out", praised for being a brilliant business strategy and reported to be "too contained" (since, at least until recently, one could only access the news feed by logging on to Facebook's home page).  In some ways, its "brilliance" is also its downfall: it allows users to see status updates, profile changes, newly added photos and videos, and more all in one spot instead of having to click on each user's page.  The problems are, probably among others, that 1) with more than 500 million active users, there is now just too much information aggregated in one place and 2) these snippets of information are now depersonalized to a micro-update, which sort of defeats the purpose of staying connected at all if (effective) social media use is about being social (read: relational).

One way to combat this single-focused information-consuming mentality is to create specialized lists that filter a user's Facebook news feeds.  Much like creating client lists on Twitter, creating custom filters for Facebook news feeds can parse out clients' updates as users so desire.  Facebook's news feeds can then be used to provide snapshots of clients' activity.  These snapshots can be utilized in many ways - to start or further conversation, to inform businesses about effective ways to change in relation to their clients, and to keep up to date on what their clients, contacts and even competitors are doing.

Beyond the news feed, which is difficult enough to navigate, Facebook has, as of 2007, opened up these feeds to RSS so they are now no longer contained simply to Facebook.  It seems that the Facebook story has been one increasingly away from a rather isolationist policy to engulfing the whole virtual and social media world.  It is thus imperative that businesses know more than simply how to use Facebook on Facebook's own terms. Not only is the Facebook world more difficult to navigate (it's not enough to improve business through social connection to simply have a profile on the site), but Facebook is also connected, in sometimes obscure and clandestine ways, to other sites, feeds and social media outlets.

Photo Credit: Dare Obasanjo