My Social Media sites

I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, Xbox Live, YouTube, and probably a bunch more social media sites that I can’t even think about right now.  There are two big problems with these disparate services.  1: How do you update them so that they don’t seem stale, and 2: How do you aggregate them so that people don’t have to go to 20 different sites to figure out what you’re doing.

All of these services have one use to me.   Driving traffic to places that I want traffic driven to.  Right now those places are my blog, and All New Comics.  What I learn from my social media experiment will be applied to what I do in my day job, but right now I’m still in the “discovery mode”.

About six months ago I got serious about figuring a way to make all of these things play together and I think I’ve mostly figured it out.

The most useful service for updates turns out to be Twitter.  It’s ridiculously simple to use, and really only has one function.  Tell people what you’re up to.  This can be in the physical world like “Getting ready to watch the BSG finale.”, or virtual “RT:  @Scobleizer I’m building my own server in the cloud, thanks to Dave Winer:… http://ff.im/1ELjc” both can be useful, or totally useless.

I try to post things that I find funny, and links that I want to revisit later.  Twitter is an incredibly useful tool to me for finding information that is relevant to my life.  The people I follow fall 50/50 into two camps.  Comic dudes, and Internet dudes.  I have a few token celebrities I follow (Ashton Kutcher, Jimmy Fallon, and John Faverau are all really interesting tweeters).  I find more interesting links and news from Twitter these days than any other source.

I’ve connected my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that my status on Twitter gets updated on Facebook.

I’ve also connected my Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr accounts through Facebook.

These things are all useful in their own rights, but to me the most useful from a social perspective are Twitter and Facebook.  With Facebook I have a way of updating my friends, my unofficial rule with Facebook used to be that I have to be “real” friends with someone to put them on my Facebook friends list, but my profile is public…because if you search for Brian Garside on the intertubes you’ll find my much more personal than my Facebook account weblog first.

With Twitter I have a place to update masses, and a whole new way of getting an audience to my website.

My blog right here, aggregates all of this stuff on the side bar, and in turn feeds Twitter and Facebook.

…and with that the circle is complete.  Facebook gets updates from Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Xbox update my blog, and my blog pushes updates out to Twitter, which then updates Facebook.

The net result is that my page views have increased, and there are conversations going on about my blog on several different places including Facebook and Twitter…it’s all incredibly incestuous and sordid, and it’s my little template for how I do social media.