Social Networking: Twitter & Facebook

Twitter & Facebook are social networking sites that allow users to create accounts in order to reconnect with old friends, make new friends, and to stay in contact with friends and family members around the world. Twitter lets you update statues or "tweet" in 140 characters or less and Facebook allows users to update status, write on friend's wall's, create events, join groups, play games, become fans, and much much more.

There are many individuals, news organizations, corporations, and non-profits using Facebook today. I, alone, am a fan of nine non-profit organizations on Facebook and follow three non-profits and two new organizations on Twitter.


According to Facebook to Nonprofits: More Pages, Fewer Apps, "Nonprofit organizations seeking to harness Facebook can get the most bang for their buck by using fan pages in addition to groups, streamlining their app usage and livening things up..." In addition, How to Market Your Business With Facebook says, "For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect "fans" the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians, and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans everyday,according to the site."


Twitter is also being used as a tool. It is now being used as a job search site, according to Twitter Could Become the Unemployed's Best Friend, "One of Twitter's advantages is that unlike e-mail messages or Facebook updates, tweets can reach an unknown audience --- a benefit that recruiters, human resources departments and job-seekers are fast discovering. In the last month, 340, 000 jobs have been listed on Twitter said William Fischer, co-founder of WorkDigital which created TwitJobSearch, a site that searches Twitter for jobs.

Some personal examples of non-profits using Twitter and Facebook to their advantage included the United Way for Southeastern Michigan. Within the last week, these are two of their "tweets" that really stood out to me:

- Metro #Detroit: Your United Way wants to input on our work in the areas of education, income, & basic needs: http://ow.ly/1djQG [Please RT]
- We've had over 1,300 metroDetroiters give us their opinion in the last 3 days. What say the other 3,902,077 of you? http: //ow.ly/1eOjl

An example of using Facebook comes from a friend who was participating in the Polar Plunge event for Special Olympics Michigan and needed to collect donations, her status read:

- Kimberly Avey http://www.firstgiving.com/kimberlyavey Please help me raise money for the Special Olympics. I am plunging tomorrow morning!!

She was able to raise $50 by just putting up a status!

These tools, such as Facebook and Twitter help to get peoples names, businesses, non-profit, goal, work, out there. It helps them to become know to a different sort of audience. It gets their product out to the social media network as opposed to just their email group or just their website or just their ad in the paper or just their television commercial. It gets them to be more well known and it gets them out there. I think it has created great opportunity for users of both sites to become more aware of their surroundings. Most of my friends check their Facebooks and/or Twitter accounts more than five times a day, and if that is how they are able to get their news and information, then I suppose it really is working for businesses and non-profits today.

For more information please visit, Facebook.com, Twitter.com and these articles, Twitter Could Become the Unemployed's Best Friend, Facebook to Nonprofits: More Pages, Fewer Apps, and How to Market Your Business With Facebook.