Social media: a personal observation

I am using this space to share my personal observations from using the big three social networking websites.

I have noticed (not surprisingly) that all social media professionals have a flair of being very social! Pardon me for the cliches, but they are very interactive and the content of their blogs, tweets or status messages are very engaging.

My social media experience is very less compared to the social media influencers who have matured along with it. However, I use my personal social media profiles: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn mainly, as a platform to practise and see how I influence my friends/followers. I often use my blog as a starting point to see which social platform drives the most traffic to my posts. It is not surprising to me that most of the traffic for my blogs come from LinkedIn, followed by Facebook, then Twitter.

This is not surprising to me because I have more people with similar interests in LinkedIn. I interact more with people on LinkedIn. My Facebook friends are ever growing and growing faster than any other profile - I guess this is one of the reason why many companies are investing on Facebook, it is easy to grow the number of fans/friends. Twitter is most fast paced of all the three networks. Tweets fleet by my timeline and often I don't have the time/energy to read all the tweets any day. Out of the thousands of tweets per day, I read about 5-10.

I had posted a question on Quora about how many tweets actually gets read by people. Interestingly, an answer by Rick Mans revealed me these very interesting stats by Sysomos. They studied 1.2 billion tweets over 2 months and observed that only 29% of the tweets generated a reaction.

So, I am not surprised why I don't get much traffic from twitter, but at the same time, I am wondering what might be the appropriate time to tweet and get noticed. I tweet at a particular time of the day and it gets burried under atleast 10 tweets in the same minute. This again makes me realise how important it is to build a personal brand and interact with the followers in order to be noticed, and sometimes to be looked out for in the heap of tweets. If I were a brand, I just need to be good in engaging people and maintain or improve the brand reputation.

I continue learning everyday and my observations continuously feed into my social media apprenticeship. This is a good note to sign off with. As always, please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.