Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace, which is the one for you?

Social networking sites are popping up all over the Internet. They are a great place for people to get to together to share ideas, find others with similar interests or specific skills with references to back them up. The following is a look at four of the biggest sites, to see if they could be helpful for you.

Twitter
Twitter’s claim to fame is the fact that it is a “micro-blogging” site. Users post “tweets” which are limited to 140 characters.   With Twitter, you sign up for user updates and when new content is posted, you receive the message on the device you specified. It’s a quick and easy way to send a brief message to a lot of people.

It is rapidly gaining fame as more and more high-profile users join. Last accounting had it over 3 million users. President Obama used Twitter successfully in his campaign for president and several news networks started reading his tweets on the air.

Probably the biggest drawback to Twitter is being overwhelmed by too many tweets. I would suggest being selective when subscribing.

Facebook
Facebook is currently the largest social networking site, hosting over 150 million active accounts. It is aimed more for personal use rather than business. It is a great place to find old friends, colleagues and classmates. In addition, there are thousands of groups to join to network with others that share the same interests. Furthermore, people have the ability to post “what they are doing right now”, enabling users to keep up with the day to day happenings of their friends.

Facebook features a creative search program that suggests “friends” that you might know by searching through your contacts and groups looking for common matches. Anyone that is your friend can see your posts, pictures, etc. so be careful who you add. Another thing to remember, news travels fast. If one of your friends posts a picture it can spread very quickly, and to thousands of people, possibly causing some difficult moments—Michael Phelps would be a great example.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the site aimed at businesses – they even label themselves as a “professional networking” site. It allows users to network with others of similar skills and interests or to find people with specific skills.

With LinkedIn, your profile is actually more of a resume, and your contacts can read and distribute it freely. Moreover, it uses a “gated access” approach—to contact someone, you have to have some sort of pre-existing relationship or get introduced by someone who does. It’s a great site to find new hires, people with specific skills and talents, and referrals – so you know the person you’re contacting is who they say they are. Many companies also use the site to find references that aren’t listed on an applicant’s resume or to find others that may have worked with them in the past.

MySpace
MySpace was the king of social networking sites until Facebook knocked them off the throne. It still has a fairly strong following however. It has morphed into more of a teen-centric site, popular with the younger crowd. The site promotes the standard features of social networking sites: personal profiles, blogs, videos, music and groups. Homepages are highly customizable if you’re handy with HTML. Parents frequently become members to keep tabs on what their kids are posting than to network with others.

In Conclusion
Social networking sites can be useful for business. Being able to network with others in your industry, or to find potential clients, by harnessing the depth and breadth of the web is enormously powerful. Just remember to keep this in mind: be careful what you post, you never know who might come back to read it.