Social Networking: What’s Your Flavor?

As social networking has become all the rage, the list of networks to join has almost become endless. While I’ve been planning this blog post for over a week now, it became a little timelier with yesterday’s Mashable post informing readers that the number of social networking users has doubled since 2007. That’s pretty incredible if you think about it. According to a recent Forrester Research report as quoted by Mashable, 55.6 million adults visit social networks at least monthly, that equates to just under 1/3 of the population. In comparison, that was 17 percent of adults in 2007 and 18 percent in 2008. However, social networking use still pales in comparison to online shopping and email use among other things. We’ll see if the redirection of Twitter, from a focus on you the user to a focus on the entire world, encourages more adults to join and further increases this ever growing adult social networking usage trend.

With so many networks to choose from, I find myself having to limit which I belong to, mainly because there are only so many hours in the day. After 8+ hours of work, a trip to the gym, and any free time I might be able to scrounge up, I don’t find myself wanting to spend endless hours on the computer checking out the happenings on all of the networks I’m a part of. Don’t get me wrong, I like every other former college student used to lose hours of my life on Facebook, but I was only going to class, studying, pursing extracurriculars, and bar hopping. All of which allotted more free time to waste in such a manner. I would like to spend more time perusing the happenings and posts, but the real world just keeps me busier.

I currently belong to three networks, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I used to be on MySpace back in college. I find my uses for each one very different. Twitter is my current favorite, mainly because it fulfills my news junkie quality. You can learn endless amounts of information on Twitter and you can share all kinds of information that you’ve learned or found interesting yourself. It’s fascinating. My use of Twitter is a mix between professional and personal. I follow all sorts of public relations, marketing, and advertising thought leaders. If these folks in my field are sharing their valuable opinions, knowledge, and experiences for free, how could I ever pass up not signing up to listen and interact? Not only am I hoping to, and already am, learning a lot from these folks, but I figure it can’t hurt future career aspirations to interact with industry professionals. Now, I feel like this means that I can’t go around tweeting worthless nonsense about my everyday happenings. This is fine with me though, I’d rather mainly share information than the ingredients of my breakfast. I also oversee and manage my employer’s Twitter account. I create tweet worthy content and interact with followers. It’s great to be able to apply all of the info I’ve learned from my favorite PR/marketing/social media thought leaders.

Next we come to Facebook. My use of Facebook has dropped dramatically from what it was back in college. While I used to seriously waste hours of time in one session, I now hop on for 10 minutes tops in most cases. Why has my usage changed? Well, partially for a lack of time like I mentioned before, but mainly because Facebook has changed so much over the past two years. Facebook is not Twitter, it never will be and it never should be. Original Facebook users like it because it’s Facebook. It’s a place where you can interact with friends, keep up with people you don’t talk to on a daily basis, and flip through a photo album to find out what’s going on in people’s lives. It’s a place where you can record your interests and your favorite things. But it’s changed so much I feel like I barely recognize it. Call me old, but I have trouble finding things on it, the status updates in the newsfeed irritate me, and I’d impossible to actually find the profile part my friends have recently updated. Other than creating content and assisting with my employer’s fan page, I don’t use my FB for professional interaction.

My LinkedIn usage is at the opposite end of the realm from that of FB. I use linked in solely for professional reasons. There I connect with other professionals, join professional groups, cover and elaborate on the tasks of my current job, list previous jobs, my skills, strengths, etc. LinkedIn for me is like one giant resume. It’s the least exciting of the networks I belong to, probably because I’ve just never really gotten into using it on a daily basis and navigating it easily. Its purpose however is fantastic and I need to learn to use it more, which I have been trying to do recently.

What social networks do you use? Myspace, Friendfeed, Friendster, if it still exists, others? And better yet, if you use multiple networks, do you use them in the same manner for the same purposes or different networks for different purposes?