Social Networks.

With twitter, facebook and google+ being the “major three”, you are now able to differentiate how you use social media. It’s crazy to me that google+ is already up there, but it seems that it is. Social media has really improved over the past few years.

There are so many ways that you can use social media networks. The key is finding out how each network works best for you.

First, we have twitter. It seems to be the put a link in your stream kind of place just because comments from others aren’t put together with the original question. The originator of the question has to make sure that the commenters use a hashtag or you have to search the users name to find all of the different responses. Don’t get me wrong, I really do love twitter because that’s where my audience first grew. It has it’s place with great relationships, all the different sites to measure the job you’re doing with influencing others, follower count, and quick, to the point 140 character tweets. I don’t really see it going anywhere even now that it has more competition. Competition will just make each site have to make things better to stay at the top of their game, which I am definitely looking forward to seeing what they come up with. Now that google + is hitting it big, I’m sure that twitter is really feeling some pressure and making some good things happen over there.

I’m mentioning google+ second here because I already like it more than facebook. Google + already has about 20 million users and it’s gaining even more momentum. The thing that I love about google +, and again it’s a little early to say who the best social site is, is that the answers to your posts are posted directly under the question. Easy enough, right? It becomes a live blog experience. People just seem to consume and respond to posts more frequently and more fluidly. I guess the third time is the charm. Wave and Buzz definitely set the path with the live response integrated into each of them and it seems that with plus, they mastered the other necessary components, like buy in from an audience.

As you already know, facebook isn’t going anywhere because even people who don’t care about social media get on facebook. It’s just the thing to do. It also seems that the main thing that facebook has over others is picture sharing and extras. The other big difference with facebook is that it’s used more for close relationships.

So as of now, twitter is my favorite, followed by google+ and facebook. I guess the order of my favorites could change over the next few months, depending on what google+ does here at the beginning of their social media presence.

Even though twitter is still my favorite, google+ and facebook seem to be the more “social” of the three networks. I mean they definitely have the makings to be more social. Twitter seems to be the site where you read content from those folks that you want to, very quickly and respond to things that spark your interest.

One main negative with social media across each of these sites, is that many people now use social media sites as spots to just shove out links. This tends to take the “social” part out of social media.

Let’s get specific with twitter, google+ and facebook…

What do you like most about each social media site? What do you think could be improved upon in each of these?