Find the social network that’s right for you
When I arrived at work this morning, I had an email waiting for me from a woman who read my story today on social networking sites. She’s a Facebook and Myspace user, but the site she wanted to talk about was a young site, Ancestral Space, that targets folks interested in genealogy.
Funny thing about the social networking sites. I have to confess that, before starting this particular beat, I didn’t spend too much time with them. Never really had a reason to. Or at least, that’s what I thought.
Earlier this year, I joined both Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Flickr as a way of educating myself for the job. Of the four, I find myself spending most of my time with Facebook and Flickr.
The reasons are pretty simple. In the case of Facebook, that’s where my friends gather. Flickr fits me because of my love of photography.
I’ve made shallow forays into LinkedIn and MySpace, but neither has proven to be a particularly good fit for me.
Outside of establishing that I am, indeed, linked to other people, I haven’t found much of a reason to spend time with LinkedIn. MySpace, on the other hand, has just been a sad experience. After some six months with my new MySpace page I still have only one friend. And that’s Tom, the guy everyone gets as a friend when they sign up.
It really illustrates, for me, the strength and weakness of social networking sites. They offer a great way to communicate with friends and keep up with people you might otherwise lose track of. But if your friends aren’t fans of a particular site, it can be awfully lonely there in that vast crowd of networking strangers.
Unless, that is, the site revolves around something you love. For me, that’s Flickr. I don’t really interact with many of my real friends there, but I enjoy posting photos and looking at other people’s work.
Tim has covered a wide range of topics, including tourism, crime, aviation and gambling, since becoming a reporter in 1990. The Oklahoma native joined the Post-Dispatch in 2007 after spending nine years in Orlando. In his spare time, he's often exploring one virtual world or another. He can be reached at tbarker@post-dispatch.com. 
Tim,
I think you outlined an issue that is only going to be come more and more prevalent in the coming years. I work in the professional networking space at konnects.com, so I have first hand experience in this field.
Not all social networks are for everybody, if you are looking to do some business networking, myspace isn’t a good place for you. If you want to be in the social space with photos, Flickr is great. The key, like you said, is to find the social networks that have the content that you like. If your friends are not on there, invite them in… all social networks have an invite function.
Brian
http://www.konnects.om
Considering that there are now so many social networks catering to such a wide range of niches, my biggest problem is finding ones relevant to me and related to my specific interests or product niches. Google seems to be inefficient and returns alot of irrelevant results. A good resource that I use to find them is this search engine for social networking sites.