[This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh of Tecmark SEO Liverpool]  You can follow Stacey on twitter @Staceycav

Social media is something of a buzz term in online right now. Facebook, Plurk, blogging, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Twitter… The list goes on. We’ve probably all heard of most of them, but really, is there any point?

Yes, is the shortest answer.

But just how can social media make life easier?

Keeping in Touch

A few years ago, you probably wouldn’t have kept in touch with all of your school friends. People flit off all over the world, marry, settle, work abroad… Things change and people move on. But thanks to sites like Facebook you can find out what all your friends are up to and send messages quickly and easily. Of course, it’s no substitute for a face to face catch up, but it makes keeping in touch with people from all over the world much easier (and cheaper than international phone calls)!

Business Networking

Linkedin is a social networking site specifically for professional networking. This and others like it have sped up the way in which we network drastically. Facebook allows people to network with others in a similar field from all over the world. Are these people you would have encountered without the Internet? Probably not.  It enables you to expand your network to international levels and make valuable contacts.

Keeping an Eye on the Kids!

Perhaps not the most conventional use of the platform, but social media sites are widely used by children and teenagers. Telling your teen they can use the sites, providing of course that they ad you to their profile, will enable you to be in the know about the company they’re keeping. It offers a certain level of reassurance.

Keeping up with the News

I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t seem to be able to make time to watch the news on the TV day in, day out. Of course I can always read the news on various news sites, but sites like Twitter now enable you to ‘follow’ your favourite news source and receive the headlines in short snippets! This gives you the opportunity, if something catches your eye, to then go read the full article. For me, a browse through the Twitter feed I have set up just for news is enough to make sure I know what’s going on and don’t feel so out of touch.

Interacting with Customers

A fine example of this is with @VirginTrains Virgin Trains on Twitter. They’re a huge company, but have someone to personally respond to complaints, questions or concerns they receive via Twitter.  Indeed a very inspired way to use the platform.  This gives Virgin a very good reputation for customer care and allows the customers the opportunity to have a personal response to a question, rather than dealing with automated telephone services!

This list just scratches the surface. As social media continues to grow (and grow it will with the recent unveiling of Google’s Buzz), the applications for its use will continue to grow too.  And of course everyone has their own personal way of using social media sites.

What do you do with social media?

How Social Media Can Make Life Easier is a post from: Interesting Observations - On blogging, social media and self improvement! the original blog written by Pearl.

©2010 Interesting Observations. All Rights Reserved.

You know there are tons of apps to make it easier for you tweet and know what your ‘friends’ and influencers are doing or saying on twitter but If you ever wanted to know little more about the people who are listening to what you are tweeting about, there is this neat little service called TwitterSheep where you put in your tweet id and it goes through your followers’ profile information to spit out a tag cloud that gives you some idea of what they are all about.  This may not be an exact and probably changes on a daily basis as your stats change based on who leaves your network and who joined.  But still, it was fun to see it.    I was kinda glad to see my followers are in the areas of my interests, social media, entrepreneurship, marketing and of course blogging. 

How about your followers?   The site doesn’t require your twitter password so you can be sure it’s safe! 

Wanna know more about your twitter followers? is a post from: Interesting Observations - On blogging, social media and self improvement! the original blog written by Pearl.

©2010 Interesting Observations. All Rights Reserved.

YES… finally Stumble Upon has listened to so many of us complain about this and are planning to allow us to add unlimited number of friends.  If you remember, back in November last year (can’t believe it’s been that long) I blogged about not being able to add my Stumble Upon friends.

With just 200 friend limit, you had to constantly ‘clean up’ your ‘friends’ to make sure you get relevant stumbles delivered to you.  This limited you from getting those people’s stumbles who added you as friends but you couldn’t reciprocate.   Not any more.  I will be able to see most of my fans’s stumbles now since I can befriend them.

According to Stumble Upon’s blog:

Over the next couple weeks we are going to separate the social & content aspects of friendship on SU, so you can subscribe to someone’s favorites without necessarily becoming their friend, and become someone’s friend without necessarily seeing their stumbles. You’ll also be able to “Subscribe” to more than 200 stumblers, since we’ve changed the way they are stored in the database. Mutuals will just be “Friends”, fans will become “Subscribers” and you’ll simply be “Subscribed to” stumblers who rate great content. We hope these changes will make things a bit easier to understand for new stumblers, while improving stumble quality for everyone.

The upcoming changes are definitely going to make an already wonderful social media site more useful and enjoyable.  I can’t wait to see the changes as the Stumble Upon team fixes some of the other bugs as noted in their post, like removing “ghosts” from the system.  Changes like “Mutuals” gaining a status of friends and “fans” becoming your subscribers.  The option to “opt-out” of stumbles of certain friends whose interests do not match yours, is going to make it even better.   I can’t wait to see the changes.

So, have you subscribed to my stumbles?  If not, check them out, I’m sure you’ll find something interesting there.   Also, if you read this blog, leave your Stumble Upon URL and I’d love to add you to my network and subscribe to your stumbles.

photo: Owlets

StumbleUpon lifts 200 friend limit is a post from: Interesting Observations - On blogging, social media and self improvement! the original blog written by Pearl.

©2010 Interesting Observations. All Rights Reserved.

Photo stealing, content theft, RSS scrapers, people hacking into your blog – we have heard about it all, but have you ever thought your entire blog could even be claimed by someone else?

But that is exactly what had happened to Ramkarthic some time ago at MyBlogLog. Someone else had claimed Ramkarthik’s blog back in August of last year and I remember freaking out about it! Talk about dishonesty on the net.  Ramkarthik was able to get the blog ownership back but I can imagine how he might have felt at the time.

So if you have an account with MyBlogLog but hardly ever log in the service, at least now you should go there and claim your blog, just like I am doing right now. There are a couple of methods to claim your blog, either by Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification by writing a post about it or by adding a Meta Tag to your website.

And God forbid, if you are the one whose blog has been claimed by someone else, go here to find out how you can get it back.

Don’t Let Someone Else Claim Your Blog is a post from: Interesting Observations - On blogging, social media and self improvement! the original blog written by Pearl.

©2010 Interesting Observations. All Rights Reserved.

Does it ever happen to you that you are working on a post and then someone else writes on the same subject? I find it happening to me very often and I end up feeling my post isn’t going to be as good and I won’t publish it! Just recently it happened twice with the same person – JohnTP, who has a post today on exchanging social media contacts.

I had this post sitting in my drafts for sometime now but I never took the time to publish it but seeing John’s post, I thought it might not be such a bad idea after all because he took the idea from Daniel Scocco who had done the same thing!

One of the reasons I kept it in the drafts folders was that I am not active on many of the sites I have joined. The only sites I check regularly are Stumble Upon, Digg, MyBlogLog and now Mixx. But here are some of the sites you might want to join me on.

Leave your contact info or profile url in the comments section so that other readers and I can also join you.

http://tyropearl.stumbleupon.com/
http://twitter.com/tyropearl
http://digg.com/users/tyropearl
http://del.icio.us/tyropearl/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=827487402
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/tyropearl/
http://www.technorati.com/people/technorati/tkathy/
http://my.mashable.com/tyropearl
http://www.mixx.com/users/pearlygates

Because of spam, your comments with links will go in the moderation queue and I will approve them at my earliest. I’ve got to brave the yucky weather now as we have frozen rain and sleet and it is not very pleasant! Actually it is completely opposite of pleasant! Did I say I hate to drive in this weather? People forget to slow down and almost every main highway is clogged with accidents every few miles!

Technorati Tags: Social Media

Would You Want to Exchange Social Media Information? is a post from: Interesting Observations - On blogging, social media and self improvement! the original blog written by Pearl.

©2010 Interesting Observations. All Rights Reserved.