Barely one month into the new year and many people have found themselves spending tens of minutes (not consecutively of course) trying to figure out what the social media landscape will look like as 2012 continues to take shape.
What seems clear is that anyone motivated enough to copy someone else’s content from other sites on the web (or just random shit that popped into their heads while high) will be eager to share it with as many casual acquaintances as possible on their social network of choice.
As Facebook began its ascent to 800 billion million active users it was far too easy to get caught up in the zeitgeist and decide that every single aspect/photo/trivial update in your life should be posted there to share with all 3,000 of your newly acquired that is separated from you six degrees from someone you only casually knew in high school.
Fortunately it didn’t take long for people to realize that the noise and annoyance level of dealing with stupid people on Facebook has the ability to be almost as frustrating as dealing with stupid people in real life. The result being that many people began to seriously cut down on the number of fake friends they had originally friended for no apparent reason.
About this time Twitter began to see a fairly significant increase in it’s growth and since you could specifically control who you followed in regardless of whether or not they were following you this seemed like a much more tolerable solution.
Not long after that Google swooped in out of nowhere, took Facebook and Twitter in a room, got them drunk and forced them to DM each other until they had a baby that Google adopted and named Google+. Basically offering some of the best features and controls of Facebook and Twitter, Google+ also threw in real-time video hangouts and stepped up their game with newer features than both other major players.
The problem many people now find themselves in is deciding what the hell to do with three dominant social media networks. Do you just share the exact same crap on each of them and see how it goes? The problem with that is that there is probably a lot of crossover between people in your different networks.
Basically you’re left with three choices:
- Post the same links/updates to each network and take the risk of being unfollowed by people who are sick of seeing the same exact posts over and over.
- Ditch two of the networks and focus exclusively on one and hope that the crossover you’re not getting isn’t enough to significantly affect your reach.
- Somehow triple your output and come up with a way to put unique content on each of the three major networks.
The one thing I have decided to do is to seriously downsize my Facebook to family, friends and people I’ve met in real life, using it for more personal updates and less as a catch all for blogging/politics/tech.
How have your social habits changed with the addition of these new tools to connect with friends, family and followers?
This highly scientific poll could well determine the fate of social media as we know it. It’s important that you answer as honestly as possible and all results will be compared to a control group of chimps who, under the threat of electroshock, were forced to take part in the same poll.
At least the main reddit guy looks like he’s frowning and concerned for your inconvenience. Have you ever noticed how happy that damn whale looks to be getting a break?
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Whether you’re a small business or an international brand, if you’re a consumer-driven business and you don’t have a presence on Facebook or Twitter you’re doing it wrong, or as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, “
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