There are probably 3 main social networking sites that the majority of business people use in the hope of generating leads – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

All three of these sites use the idea of micro-blog status updates to some extent to communicate with followers, friends and contacts.

A lot of people use tools to send multiple updates to all of these invariably using Twitter as the main source, so every thought that they tweet, every comment they make, picture they take or YouTube video they favourite is automatically posted everywhere.

In my opinion this is the wrong thing to do. By treating every audience the same you will end up alienating one of them or just be ineffective to another.

I use all three – but I use them in different ways.

As @ChrisHatch on Twitter I will tweet all sorts of nonsense and I am quite happy to dip in a read, answer and look at other peoples tweets of pictures of their dog or follow their links to “interesting” websites.

I also tweet as @Zedoary and post news about the company, adverts about our services and updates on latest projects.

Any one can follow either Twitter feed and I follow people I find interesting. In a sense Twitter is an informal communication tool and because of the nature of the feed you only really read the current Tweets.

The linking of Twitter to Facebook is almost excusable and for a while I did this. However if you are an excessive Tweeter the high volume of posts in Facebook will probably annoy other, non Twitter users. Also Facebook is not just a “now” thing and people read profiles to see what happened in the past, if they see hundreds of posts of Re-Tweets and links to other sites they may not be impressed.

A better choice would be to use the “selective Twitter application” where worthwhile tweets for the Facebook audience are marked with a #fb.

The biggest mistake of all is to link Twitter to LinkedIn. I’ll say it again, IT’S A MISTAKE TO LINK TWITTER TO LINKEDIN.

In my opinion LinkedIn should be used in a completely different way – it is primarily a business tool and a way to let people know what you are doing in Business. It is not social in the same way and putting personal Tweets into it is not appropriate.

As an audience colleagues on LinkedIn are not interested in the cup of tea or the cake you baked – but the project you are working on.

You can link Twitter to it in a similar way as Facebook using a #in tag and send appropriate tweets.

Tweetdeck

Another choice is to use Tweetdeck to manage all the accounts. Using this software you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and send the appropriate message each one. (It also handles MySpace accounts too if you are young and trendy).

In Summary

It is wrong to treat all social media as the same – they are not the same audience expecting the same thing even if they are the same people.

Don’t use it as a blunt tool, shouting the same message at anyone who will listen – tailor the message to the audience, it will be more effective and less annoying.

It takes no more time, just some thought.

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