Analysis of my social media practices

I obsess over use social media…. a lot of social media. It interests me.

We visited with a friend who made fun of Twitter, FourSquare and Google+ all in one sitting. Afterward, I decided to dissect my motives for the social media that I use.

• Facebook: Facebook is still the king of social networks, it’s been around since high school and I use it to connect with friends and relatives with the occasional brand liking or general creeping that most users participate in.
• Twitter: Twitter is actually one that I take the most trash talking about, but it’s due to Twitter that I have enjoyed some of the most entertaining content, as well as found some great information…. and you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog if I didn’t have a Twitter account. I value Twitter the most though for keeping up with the communication industry and brands that I care about following. When we were planning our wedding, Twitter also proved itself to be a great content aggregation tool. If a topic struck me as interesting, I clicked the link, if not I moved on. I’ve tried to use it for customer service, but that hasn’t really caught on yet. (If you run a Twitter account for your company, PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT YOU…. they might be talking to you about a problem.)
• LinkedIn: This one is a little more obvious, it’s my professional connection site. I have resume information up there and some awesome public recommendations. “Want my references? Sure! You can read them on my LinkedIn!” I also use LinkedIn in a research capacity. It was useful in job interviews but also is useful when looking up professionals who I’m going to work with or contact. I sort of owe my current job to LinkedIn.
• Foursquare: This is my game. I “play Foursquare.” I started using it when we went to Seattle and once I started earning badges and reading tips, I was hooked. It’s also been cool to see what’s around me in new and familiar cities. (I also try to outscore my traveling friends…)
• Google+ : It’s new, it’s hyped and it’s communication. Of course I’m on it! I’m also trying to figure out it’s uses for public relations later on. Don’t worry, I’ll share my thoughts on at another time.
• Classmates.com: I have a profile, it still has my maiden name which should indicate how active I am there. I mainly opened it because I was supposed to for class-reunion purposes. Somehow, I suspect that Facebook will serve that purpose.
• Flixster: This is an app on my Facebook and phone as far as I’m concerned. I use it to rate movies (duh) and read movie reviews. It’s informative most of the time.
• Good Reads: I do have an account here. I haven’t updated it in awhile but I joined to compare books lists with some relatives. But I feel like going back on and adding more that I’ve read and maybe that will help me figure out what I still want to read. (Being a grown-up has increased my reading capacity… probably due to lack of textbook brain stress.)
• Delicious: My use is less social and more personal. I use it to bookmark sites I want to read later (on a different computer usually). But it’s helpful for research occasionally.
• Blog: This one is obvious, but since I have two it’s even more specialized.

As an additional note:

I used MySpace, Xanga and DeviantART for a significant amount of time during early social media. Due to the increased annoyance and creepiness on MySpace, I closed my page. Xanga provided a blogging feature that turned into my personal journal and that got a little old so I closed it too (but not before backing up my unique writing entries). Thanks to Xanga, when I was in high school you could Google my speech category: International Extemporaneous Speech and my blog was the first result! I used DeviantART to share my poetry and photography but shut it down as apparently my artistic work attracted creepy people.

I technically have Google Buzz, but I never actually bothered figuring it out. It appeared one day (with a surprisingly low level of hype) and proceeded to annoy me when I logged into Gmail. But now it just exists.

I might be over-socialed. But since I love all communication, it works. I actually consulted a list to try to get everything in there.

I may have failed.

Do you have different motivations for using different social media platforms?

UPDATE

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–

I have begun to use Pinterest to browse for DIY project and home organization ideas. I pin my favorites for later.