Social Media Lines Blurring

As social media continues evolve, grow, blossom and even mature among both personal users and businesses, the lines are beginning to blur among them.

Well known social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are now being used in the same sentence as Twitter and Flickr.  Isn’t Twitter a micro-blogging tool?  Isn’t Flickr a photo content sharing tool?

What about YouTube?  Is YouTube a social networking site?

I don’t intend to give you a concrete answer to these questions.  Who am I to define these platforms? The user community is defining them.  But I will offer some offline comparisons to consider as you ponder this question.

If you belong to a health club, you joined it (presumably) to exercise.  On the surface, that is the purpose of a health club (or gym).  If you belong to a business organization such as a chamber or local business club, each of these organizations has a defined charter.  When you join any of these organizations mentioned here as examples, the premise of your membership is to participate in their charter.

Even if you joined any of the above for pure networking, you have to play by their rules.  You can’t go to your gym and hand out fliers and a business card in street clothes.  You’ll annoy so many patrons you’ll get kicked out. 

I have developed some very good relationships at my health club that carry into my personal and professional life.  I can say the same for a local non-profit business club I belong to (TBTF).  In both cases, my intent has been sincere.  I go to my healthclub to workout.  I go to TBTF functions to get involved, give of my time and talents and meet smart people.  Because both of these examples are local to me, I occasionally overlap.  I see people at my healthclub that belong to TBTF and vice versa.

The same can be said of social networking, even though the local aspect is much less a factor.  I know people in Facebook whom I also know in LinkedIn and Twitter, and vice versa.

So, what’s the benefit to this cross platform networking online?  I submit there are many benefits.  At a minimum I can meet other smart and interesting people through both platforms, and I really enjoy meeting smart people.

Since my profession is Internet marketing, and in particular we do search engine optimization (SEO) for our clients, another benefit is exposure to the content I produce.  Such exposure can result in content being shared among the network resulting in quality links.  Some content exposure can be incidental and some can be intentional. 

As I continue to network in the online social media world, I’m amazed at how the mutual benefits of social, networking and relationship building coincide with SEO value through the propagation of content and organic link building that occurs.

What’s your experience on social networks?  Which platforms do you use the most?  Which platforms mentioned here are social networking sites and which are (fill in the blank)?

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