First off let me start by saying I am far from being an expert on Social Networking. I am a bit of an addict, but expert, not at all. I do consider myself to be somewhat web savvy, and spend a considerable amount of my timeTwitter and Facebook on my Blackberry Bold. But I learn something new about social networking every day. I just want to give you guys a little history about my social networking ride to date. This is a 2 part blog so stay tuned for the next Blog about getting onto Twitter.
I first got involved years ago in the social networking realm with Plaxo. This was a cool online app that let me keep my Outlook contacts up to date. It would tell me when people’s birthdays were, and allowed me from time to time to requested updated addresses etc. If my contact was a member of Plaxo too it would automatically update my address book when they made changes and vice versa. So my trek into social networking was born. I mean for all real purposes social networking is just a way of tracking friends and family digitally, right?
Then I got onto MySpace. It was cool to connect with some old friends but it never really grabbed me. Then there was Facebook. I got hooked up on Facebook when I started as an assistant coach for a college volleyball team in Boston in the spring of 2008. We used Facebook as a recruiting tool. All the kids were on there and I found out at the time some of my friends were too. About the same time a friend of mine who is a Twitter expert (@amyblack) told me I should check it out. Life went on and my daily Facebook addiction took a hold. I found I interacted with my friends more on Facebook than in real life. This is because most of them don’t live in the same state and even if they did we were busy with jobs etc. All the while I maintained a Twitter account (@afm1374) but was never really active. Then along came Shaq (@the_real_shaq). I found him on Twitter early in his tweeting (The action of sending a twitter post) days and a number of other fun people to follow and got hooked. So now between Facebook and Twitter, I am constantly updating and checking things out.
As for the business side of things, the same thing applies. I have customers all over the world and honestly I have only met a select few face to face, but I need to keep up with them and hopefully they want to know what I’m doing. With that I started a Facebook Page for GDS and also added a Twitter account (@GDSProducts). This way I can keep up with my customers and they can get their hands on some great deals that I try to have for just Facebook and Twitter folks. Plus it allows us all a nice place to share things quickly about what is going on in our worlds. To me it is a good way to communicate without the inconvenience of interrupting someone with a phone call, and it is not the same email clutter that email blast are. This allows my customers to read and gather the information when they want it, not when I am shoving it down their throats.
I think that you will come to find out that Twitter is here to stay and to easily communicate with our customers; we must all learn to communicate on Twitter. No matter how big or small our business is. To follow in my next blog will be my tips and tricks for getting onto Twitter.
