How I use social media?

I was thinking about this for the past few months, how do I use or how should I use all the social “stuff” out there? As I thought about it, this is the picture that surfaced. It works for me, maybe it will work for you, maybe not. Maybe I’ll change some things in the future. I use the three main social sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Facebook
Facebook is purely personal, I will not accept any professional invites. I only connect with family and friends. Sorry, I just don’t think someone who I met at a conference needs to see my family pictures.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is of course a professional networking site. I will gladly accept invites to connect with people I met at conferences, trade shows, trainings and probably anyone else. Usually if I get a business card and I will look up that person on LinkedIn and send him or her an invite. I think it’s much better way to keep in touch than saving the business somewhere. I always connect to recruiters that are posting job ads, you just never know how they can help you in the future.

Twitter
My Twitter feed is open so anyone can follow me, professional contacts as well as friends. Probably 80% of what I post is work related and the other 20% are articles that I read and some other interesting stuff.

My blog
I also run a blog. If you are reading this than you probably know about it already. My blog is mostly work related. Occasionally I’ll post something on my travel or any other interesting stuff.

Posting
As you probably know, you can connect your LinkedIn account with your Twitter account. Once you do that, if you add #in or #li to any tweet, that tweet will also appear in your LinkedIn feed (it’s also possible for LinkedIn to read all your tweets, without using #in or #li). I usually forget to add #in. I started using a service called ping.fm which allows to post to multiple sites.

There are also micro-blogging sites such as Posterous and Tumblr. I still haven’t figured how to use them for either work or personal.