Survival Tactics for Gen Y

If you’re like me, social media is a big part of your life on the web. It’s where you go to check up on your friends/contacts, get updated on the latest news, and it’s where you show your character and express your feelings.

But social media is much more than that. Each network you’re a part of is different in its own way. Facebook is better at keeping track of people/relationships and Twitter is better at keeping track of the latest trends/news.

So, wouldn’t you like to be able to leverage each of these websites’ strengths in order to achieve a more positive persona on the web?

In this article, I’m going to show you a few things you can do to connect your networks and build your web. Let’s get started.

Blogging

My first suggestion would be to start a blog, but not just a blog, a social hub where your contacts can go and see links to all of your social networks/profiles. A blog is also a place where you can go to express your opinions and share just who you are in more than 140 characters (typically). By placing links to your blog on all of your social websites you can direct all of your friends and contacts to the same page. Not only will this increase traffic to your blog substantially, but it will also make it easier for you to keep track of all of your contacts and followers.

If you are going to start a blog or website I, along with most bloggers, recommend WordPress. WordPress has a wide array of plug-ins and widgets that will help you integrate your social profiles into your blog.

FriendFeed

If you don’t want to take the time to make a full blog, a great site to direct people to is FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a social aggregator that was recently purchased by Facebook. I really like this site because it’s like a cross between Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to consolidate information from social media outlets, social bookmarking sites, blogs, micro-blogs, and RSS feeds. You can take all of this information, including your own original content, and create a customized feed to share on the Web.

FriendFeed also has the ability to stream their updates to other social networking sites like Twitter. In my opinion, when it’s all said and done, Facebook will have turned FriendFeed into such a powerful tool that it will overtake Twitter as the most popular micro-blogging/link aggregating platform on the web. But that’s for another discussion.

Ping.fm

Let’s say you don’t necessarily want to create a lot of your own content, but you just want to share what you find interesting with others. Ping.fm is great for that.

Ping.fm is a tool that allows you to update all of your social networks at once, from one location, anywhere on the web. This is great because it saves you the time of logging in and out of each website individually and it allows you to update all of your networks simultaneously. If you have a really important story that you want to share (like your latest blog post), Ping.fm is an easy way to share that message with all of your contacts at the same time. There’s nothing that a web surfer likes more than receiving access to fresh content on the spot!

There are so many great tools available for building your social community.  I will be discussing more and more of these tools as the weeks roll by, but hopefully this is a good place for you to start!