Pretty much on every business card, email signature or website footer you can find these three magical URLs - for  Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, and less often but still used Facebook Fan Page. We all do it because we’ve read about it in “Must Dos” suggestions or heard from business partners. These are our Social Media footprints as business owners.

At this point we believe we know for sure why do we need to have a presence on all these 3 major Social Networks and what we suppose to do with them. But do we?

By definition we consider LinkedIn as a social network for business contacts, Facebook for communicating with friends and family and Twitter as a tool for...well there isn’t any concrete and definitive definition as its purpose has been morphing over the years of its existence. I guess at this point Twitter can be described as a mass distribution and consumption tool for real-time information. But, like with many things in our life, there is always a difference between a definition and how different people interpret that definition.

LinkedIn

Absolutely, if you are serious about your personal career and your business it’s a crime not to have presence on LinkedIn and not to have a personal life-time resume. and feel confident about your options for making a living - no matter what happens tomorrow with your current job you can always pull out your LinkedIn connections list and connect with the right people to help you with finding the next job, and there are no doubts that you have potentially endless number of ventures for B2B matters. But spending so much time on work we unconsciously use it for personal purposes as well - quite often people we communicate with on LinkedIn could be our friends as well and thus we send private messages and discuss things on Discussions, and that has nothing to do with our business. It’s just another way to get away from work without stoping to work :-)

Facebook

Ok, by now people who either have a Facebook profile or heard about FB from their friends have watched “Social Network” movie already :-) and have a good picture of what Facebook is about. At the beginning its sole purpose was to connect people or help to establish connections with people you socialize with in a real life but then business interests came in and lots of companies tried to create fake profiles to get a presence. Eventually Facebook created Fan Pages to give businesses a legitimate way of presenting themselves. It was a great idea but I think expectations were too high and many companies got their moment of frustration when using their fan page for business.

Twitter

If you had watched Even Williams interviews on Web2.0 Summit 2010 or 2009 you should have gotten a sense that Twitter is still work in progress.  It’s indisputable that right now the majority of Twitter users do not use it for its original purpose and so the site slogan has changed from “What are you doing” to “The best way to discover what’s new in your world.” But I think it’s impossible to come up with a slogan which would reflect Twitter’s purpose right now, too many people are using it for too many different purposes.

Bermuda Triangle

To be able to answer a question what’s in for me in terms of using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn a business owner should always understand that as long as it’s about SOCIAL, it’s about human interaction, all these channels for communication with your clients, prospects, media, basically anybody who is interested in your business.

And so Facebook Fan Page is absolutely capable of bringing tangible results to your business if you understand that its purpose is not limited to collecting fans for your music band or helping in gathering fans for your next movie blockbuster. It is about showing people who runs your business, what people stand behind your company name.  This will help you build trust between you and your customers and business partners.

Think of Twitter as a website which presents a graph of people’s interests - Who Likes What and so if you have a clear vision of what is the scope of interests you can attribute to your business and show them in your tweets and so you can and will attract people’s attention and begin conversation with your prospects and clients.

The bottom line is that if you know people you and your business interacts with, you aren’t going to get lost in this “Bermuda Triangle - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.”

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Artyom Diogtev,

Head of Social Media at ComboApp

http://marketing.comboapp.com