I broke down and joined Facebook. Now what?

Last week a good friend of mine was in town from Australia for a few days. We only get to see each other about once or twice a year as pops into town on his worldwide travels. I was giving him grief for not doing a better job at keeping in touch and he said “if you were on Facebook we would always be connected”. 

I have been resisting joining Facebook for a while now. I’m not a big fan of social network sites because I don’t have the time to manage them and I don’t get what benefit they provide to my life. Earlier this year I joined Twitter and just a few days later I opted out as it was sucking away too much valuable time. Same with LinkedIn. I still haven’t figured out how to make the best use of that site. 

So when joining Facebook came up I was hesitant. But I’m an open minded kind of guy so I said to myself “Self, give this one a try”. And I did. And boy, am I glad. 

Within a few hours I got in touch with 3 long lost friends from Israel, Sweden and England. Good friends. Solid relationships that were missed. Although I tried to get in touch with these friends through traditional old fashion means (you know, phone, email) it’s been hard to pin them down. Facebook brought us back together.

I know that many people use Facebook for business networking. To me it feels like a sacred personal space. An exclusive, private area that I can nurture as much as I nurture the personal relationships in my life. Or so it feels only after being on there for less than 24 hours.  I guess time will tell. I’m curious to see who else shows up and what the connections I make here lead to. After all, connecting to people is number one marketing activity on my list. Hopefully Facebook will ease the process.

Comments

[Dani Nordin]

I love Facebook! I actually combine it with twitter; my twitter posts update my Facebook status automatically. But I've found it good for both personal and business connections. It's one thing to meet a professional contact on LinkedIn and talk to them about your qualifications/process, etc. It's another thing altogether to beat them at Scramble or Sodoku and THEN get down to talking business.

[AP]

So, there you have it. You're able to keep in contact with your old, distance pals and it's free, how about that?

Your mental block about the usefulness of social networks might come not having a clear associations with each network:

Facebook: Fun, do during my downtime
Twitter: Semi-fun and work related-schedule from time throughout the day to update and stick to that update time.
Linkedin: Serious Networking-look for new contacts you might connect with, add them to your contact management system, follow up, follow up, share, earn a biz contact for life, follow up, grow professionaly and then convert.

Networking online is about long term conversion. I heard of a site that helps people as busy as you keep up with all of the networks called: ping.fm. Something to look into.