Facebook and Twitter: Making Important Connections

Right now, even as a college student if you don’t have a Facebook or some other social networking account, you can be pretty out of the loop on some things. While I personally think that Twitter is a little excessive (and because I’m not to savvy on its inner workings), I really like using Facebook better. These social networking sites are so useful to people because they provide easy and quick access to friends, family, partners, businesses and basically anyone wants to be their “friend”. These are just a few of these social networking sites:

Many different people have many different uses for social sites. Individuals use these as networking tools, ways to keep in touch with friends and family, to find jobs and to ask questions/ get customer service from companies/ organizations that are also on Facebook or another networking site. News organizations use Facebook and Twitter to quickly get and spread information to and from sources, citizens, companies etc. Companies and non-profit organizations basically use these sites in the same ways in that they use them as a tool to raise awareness for their brand/product or cause, to get people involved with their efforts/ interacting with their business, to take donations/ sales, and to generally further their business/message. As Claire Cain Miller stated in her New York Times article, “[these social sites] can reach an unknown audience—a benefit that recruiters, human resources departments and job-seekers are fast discovering.”

There was also some mention in some of the articles I read about the concerns of fan groups that are set up on these sites and how that might affect your brand or campaign. I found a pretty interesting video about Coca-Cola and two big fans that kind of provided a possible upside to these "impostors" :

Using Facebook makes a lot of sense for small businesses for exactly the reasons that were brought up in the New York Times article on How to Market Your Business. For example, like I mentioned before, Kermit Patterson explains that, “Small businesses are using [social networking sites] to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.” As uncomfortable as I feel about advertisers targeting me through my Facebook information, I will admit that it’s a smart idea. In the same article, Clara Shih explains why it makes sense, “You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are…and with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”However, I found a video in which Andrew Davis of Tippingpoint Labs makes some really good points about how businesses should be smart and be careful with their Facebook accounts:

Should my company be on Facebook? from Tippingpoint Labs on Vimeo.

As William Fisher pointed out, “Twitter [and other networking sites are] cheaper, faster and easier way[s] to recruit.” The magazine I work for uses Facebook to get people to go to our networking events, read our articles and even to recruit staff and collaborators. We have definitely gotten the word out about the magazine since we’ve been on Facebook.

As I mentioned before, many people simply use these sites to keep in contact with or find family and friends. Some people are taking that idea to the next level and are using Facebook to find missing children. I found a story where 27years after her son went missing a mom found him on Facebook and they were reunited. A non-profit organization called Missing Children South Africa uses their Facebook group page to help find missing children, and since their page went up on FB they’ve found three children! If that’s not greatly benefiting from Facebook, I don’t know what is.

Like Randi Zuckerburg talked about, it is to the advantage of many non-profit organizations to create a page on sites like Facebook since “more than 8 million Facebook users become ‘fans’ of new pages each day” it’s a great way to make people notice your cause."

These social networking sites are also really making changes in the way news organizations report. As I mentioned earlier, these social networking sites allow you to reach a bigger audience, and as Dorian Benkoil explained, “Most journalists are happy to have their work spread to as many eyes and ears as possible.” “The basic idea, though, is that once you're in Facebook, you'll stay there -- to communicate with people, get information, post photos and videos, play games, maybe even consume music and videos, or shop. With a newly powerful search and other tools, users may not want or need to open a new browser to search in Google or Yahoo or go to a Web site for whatever news and information they seek,” is the reasoning Benkoil gives for why it is in news organizations best interest to take part in advertising or promoting their organization on networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. By not doing so they could be completely passed over by internet surfers.

Social networking sites may even make some journalists jobs easier or at least could lead them to better or more information. "I think today social media is very important as a journalistic source. It provides journalists with a wider range of opinion, and gives them access to a whole range of voices,” says Peter Horrocks, BBC World Service director. He suggests a topic that we’ve learned earlier in the semester when discussing the events between Google and China, how we can use the internet and these social networking sites to quickly spread news and information from remote or restricted areas. I appreciated how he mentioned that even though its quick information and, as a news organization, you want to spread it just as quickly when you get it, you have to take into consideration and treat it like you would any other source and apply the same journalistic standards.

Social networking sites relate to The Long Tail concept in that they provide a voice to individuals within a large audience; they allow for the spread of information between individuals and large corporations and organizations; they give easy access and forms of advertising to small and local businesses; and they give individuals or groups a chance to rally supporters, employees, or even just people with common interests. Anyone with a social networking site increases their chances of getting exposure, potentially leveling out business monopolies in certain areas, giving people a chance to voice their own personal opinion to many viewers, and providing valuable networking tool(potentially giving more people opportunities for success).