It Boggles the Mind - [website] Published: 12th of Apr 2011 by: (c) Staff Training Reporter
Have you LinkedIn your Facebook when you Tweet on your MySpace?
With all the different types of social networking tools available today the internet can – instead of making life simpler – complicate things more than ever before.
Apart from choosing which services to use, getting your head around how each one works can be a task that absolutely boggles the mind.
Facebook’s the easy one; we all (barring the small community of people who live beneath a rock) use it everyday, probably numerous times throughout the day, and its settings are therefore the ones we’ve become most used to.
Sending personal messages, writing on someone’s wall, updating your status and sharing media content is really easy with Facebook, but once you’ve become used to its relative ease the other social networking sites become quite confusing to say the least.
LinkedIn allows you to connect with and recommend businesspeople, join groups of like-minded people, create statuses and share content, while Twitter lets you ‘follow’ other users, create your own updates (Tweets) and send direct messages to other users.
Flickr is for photos, MySpace is for teens and if you’re into blogging there are tons of sites just for this purpose.
But then it gets even more complicated.
Once you’ve found the networks you want to be a part of and have mastered (or at least come to grips with) the settings, you can start to synchronise them so that when you update one site the rest are updated automatically.
Enter Hootsuite, a tool that allows you to manage all your social networks from one place so you can see exactly what’s happening in each, decide which to post updates to, which to display your blog posts, and you can even schedule messages and updates for sending at a later time if you plan on being away from your desk.
I’m sure this tool is going to make the whole social media thing a hang of a lot simpler for a lot of people, just as soon as we can figure out these darn settings...
