LinkedIn vs Facebook, or in other words which is my favorite social media

Dear readers,

For a couple of months now I’ve been thinking of writing a blog article about what social media means today and what it opportunities it offers for the companies and for the individuals, like myself. Of course I realize that there are many similar articles out there, but I also wanted to share my point of view, which I believe is a little different.

As a person working in a big international company I fully realize how important your company’s presence in the social media is. And not only the presence, but rather the interaction with the customer. It is also very important to build a community of loyal customers for your company and having an official company account in any social media is a great way to do that.

I noticed that many of our customers use all kinds of social media to connect to us or to alarm us about a certain issue. For example people often use Tweeter to give us their feedback on a certain case, or even tell us that their websites are down (something which I always find odd, since that fastest way to get this issue resolved is to contact us via our phone numbers, chat or even e-mail). For a big company that wants to have good online presence this means that new positions and new jobs are now opening – you need to have a person to take care of your Facebook account, a person to constantly monitor your Tweeter account and also your company profile on LinkedIn. Of course most of that is done by the marketing team of any company, however more and more businesses hire a specialist in the field of social media just to play it safe so to speak.

Since this is  my personal blog after all I would also like to shared my point of view about the top 3 most popular social networks today: FaceBook, LinkedIn and Tweeter. Here is my breakdown:

• FaceBook – I started using it years ago since most of my friends did not use MySpace (the first social network account that I ever had). Now to me MySpace was a lot better than FaceBook – you had the freedom to update your background image, you could add a list of songs to your profile, you could add galleries with your best pictures that display in a flash gallery every time someone visits your profile… the list is very long. To this day I still think that FaceBook is very overrated, but I use it everyday mostly because 95% of my friends have accounts there and that is an easy way to stay in touch with them and see what they are doing. In conclusion – I don’t like FaceBook a lot, but sadly I have to use it every day.
• LinkedIn – Now I understand that the sole concept of LinkedIn is very different from the one of FaceBook, but still I have to say that I like LinkedIn far better. There is a certain… well class I guess in this social network. You can read really interesting article there compared to the ones on FaceBook and you can connect to many powerful and interesting people that you would rarely have the chance to talk to in real life. I was also impressed by the letter that LinkedIn sent to me when they reach 200 000 000 members, see it attached below:When I clicked on the “Read More” button I want taken to another very good and classy looking page, which also had a personal touch to it, it was really like opening a letter (a thrill which I haven’t experienced for a while now, since all the letters received by regular mail are bills and adverts). I would also like to shared that page with you since I was truly impressed by it, great design indeed:Nice touch LinkedIn, you win my heart :).
• Tweeter – From all the social media networks out there this is the one that I like the lease. Probably you noticed that I don’t even mention Tweeter in the topic of this article. Maybe after the previous 2 sentences it goes without saying that I still do not have a tweeter account, nor do I plan to create one in the near future. I just don’t see the point in sharing my thoughts in 144 symbols – why would I limit myself to that? What if I want to say a little bit more on a certain topic? I would also like to share something from a professional point of view: often when we have to reply to our customer’s request via Tweeter we can’t even begin to explain the case in 144 symbols, not to mention resolve it. There is another thing that I hate about this limit: due to it often people have to “cripple” the English language by using “4” instead of “for”, “u” instead of “you” and so on. You can call me a grammar Nazi, but I really hate it when people write with spelling error, regardless of the language they use (English or Bulgarian I mean). I don’t think that this is suitable for a business communication as well. It wouldn’t be very professional if I send a message like “We would do that 4 u”, would it. Don’t know, maybe I’m just old fashioned, but still I think I would never have the need to open a personal Tweeter account, even though if I would immediately start following Obama ;).

In conclusion: LinkedIn is by far my personal favorite social media.

Best regards,
Dimitar D.