by Jacob Morgan

I’m not going to even try to speculate on the amount of social media companies out there. Nor am I going to try to guess on the niche markets that have already been penetrated. All I am going to say is that there are a lot of social media companies out there, and the number of niche plays are slowly dwindling down. So, this begs the question, how much social media can you handle?

I’ll start off by divulging the social media platforms that I use and what I use them for:

Linkedin:
Great for networking and making business connections. I find the question and answer feature especially valuable. I put my linkedin profile link on my blog and sometimes on my business cards. This make it easy for anyone to find out a bit more about my professional and educational background.

Facebook:
Also good for networking, however I find that linkedin is a bit more professional, that is just my opinion. I do find facebook rather useful when it comes time to find out about new events that I should attend since they appear in my friend stream. I also use the post item feature to share links with my friends. Of course there is also the random play and fun.

Twitter:
Twitter has been a very valuable resource for me, I have met a lot of my twitter friends, OFFLINE, via events, conferences, etc. Twitter is almost like a world wide chat conversation. I get a lot of tech news from twitter as well as relevant event information. I also use twitter to share links with my followers and of course engage in discussion. I love the immediate response, it’s like having access to your own personal information group, very valuable indeed.

Digg:
The only thing I really use dig for is sharing links and blog posts, I wouldn’t call it a must have tool, but I have definitely gained a few readers from sharing my posts. I use it about 1-2 times a week. Whereas the others I use daily.

Plurk:
I can’t say that I have really been using plurk that much, but ever since my plurk post a few weeks ago I have been getting friend requests and have decided to try it out. I am still much more active on twitter, but I do plurk every now and then.

I would say that the above 5 are my most active social media platforms, sometimes I poke around on friendfeed, but not that often. Out of the above 5 I would only consider linkedin, facebook, and twitter, to be my most active social media platforms. Now, it’s not because I don’t like the other great platforms out there, it’s because I can’t handle anymore. How many different friend groups, friends, passwords, usernames, etc. can you possible have? Am I supposed to log into 10 different social media platforms every day to check for updates? I’d never leave the house!

So, what does this mean for the social media world? Well, simply put there are two choices. Either, something like friendfeed is going to figure out a way to aggregate all of a users social media streams into one, or, we are going to continue to see a segmentation of social media platforms and users. What social media platforms do you use and why?

We are at a crucial stage of social media evolution, the only question is, what are we going to evolve to?

Thanks for reading

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Tagged as: social media platforms, social media saturation, too much social media