Just read the latest from Penelope Trunk.
Do you know who is using social media? Gen X. The average Twitter user is in their 30s. The median age of LinkedIn is 40. The majority of people who are joining Facebook right now are over 35. This is because Gen X wants to meet new people online and reconnect with all the friends they lost along the way. Gen X is using social media to network.
I have embraced all of the above. I was a semi-early adopter of linkedin. Facebook has turned out to be fun. And today, ironically, I discovered a few things about Twitter that I am LOVING!
I figured out how to add a TON of followers. So what you say. Well…I am driving a ton of traffic to this blog. I am fine tuning as I go. Targeting and attracting people that will like what I am doing here.
All for free. All from the internets.
I agree with Penelope. I am trying to reconnect with all the people I lost along the way. Some of them should stay lost. As I should probably stay lost from THEM. I use all three tools differently. I try to use all of them to drive a little bit of traffic to this blog.
I use Linkedin to manage my professional network. It works.
I use twitter solely as a marketing tool. I only use it to “tweet” back and forth with 3 people. I use it to drive traffic. I want to see how many followers I can add. Then I want to see how many people I can get to the site. Then I want to see how many come back and/or subscribe.
Math and science people. Math and science.
I use Facebook to reconnect to old friends. I LOVE this about fb. It lets me get in my way back machine and re-connect with people I LOVED at some prior point in time. I’ve moved around a lot. I’ve lost people. FB ties me back in….sometimes only on the peripheral. But it is better than not at all.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Gardner // May 13, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Mike, good reflection. I think there are many that use these modes of social media in a similar fashion. I’m still not sold on Twitter yet, but I too use LinkedIn and FB in similar fashion. I am what you might call Generation “Edge”, according to some I’m last year of the Baby Boomers and others, the first year of Gen-X. I’ll still be experimenting with Twitter till I decide whether its useful or not.
2 mikelally // May 13, 2009 at 12:29 pm
@Gardner – thanks for commenting. Just to be clear – I am not using twitter like I use FB or LI. I am actually using Twitter like I would use direct mail or telemarketing. Semi-permissive. I just added 400 twitter followers. Which resulted in 15 hits to the blog. 4% is a great “conversion” rate. Next is to see who comes back.
3 Gardner // May 13, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Thats my point, I guess. I would like to use Twitter but haven’t found the usefulness you have out of it. Right now it s great way to follow updates on my industry from various sources. I haven’t found a way to be useful back to my followers yet, of which there are few.
4 @nimbleassistant // May 14, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Hey Mike, I laughed out loud when I read “Some of them should stay lost. As I should probably stay lost from THEM.” It’s true how it’s less than utopic in making connections but the valuable far outweigh the distractors. I love Twitter because you follow or unfollow without have to beg, admit, or create affiliations. It’s very fluid, people come and go and we usually get the information to stretch our minds and make new connections. Thanks for the follow!
Nimbly,
Jennifer
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