First you were a friend. Next you were a follower. Then a connection. Now you’re an acquaintance, a close friend and a fan. If you’re lucky (and interesting enough) you’ve been added to lists. Social networks have gotten complicated. Thanks to the explosion of categories and types we have more labels than ever before.
Thankfully, our trusted social networks have tried to make the complex changes as easy as possible for us by using their clever algorithms to pick out and understand our lives, encapsulate them and present them back to us. Your favourite social networks are trying to organise your life – they tag you in lists, they tell you who to connect with, they advise you who to follow.
Do you trust an app to know your life better than you do? Are you worried you’ll start to live an insular existence dominated by too many people that are similar to you? Maybe it’s time to take control of your online social networking. But to do that you have to understand it…
A Beginner’s Guide to Social Network Definitions
This amazingly simple (yet addictive) site lets you Tweet to the world using 140 characters or less.
Followers
The bonus of Twitter is that you can (more or less) follow anybody. Follow people like you, follow people that people you follow follow, or find random people to follow through searches (are you keeping up?). As soon as your account is live you’ll start to gain followers; don’t be scared, this is a good thing. If you follow more people, more people will follow you back. If you Tweet a lot, you’ll get more followers.
Lists
You’ll be added to Twitter lists if what you say on a subject is interesting. Twitter users create lists so they can easily see a stream of Tweets by a group of people. Being on a list is good for your ego as it means someone cares what you have to say. Creating your own lists can make your life easier and boost someone else’s ego in return. Win win.
Favourites
Twitter users can mark one of your Tweets as a favourite which lets them keep hold of it and return to it at a later date. Knowing that someone cares enough to click the little star will make you feel smug. 
I could go on and on about Facebook as it is huge and ever evolving – as we found out last month – but I’ll try to keep this short…
Friends
Everyone knows that you have friends on Facebook, but in September 2011 everything changed. Facebook realised that you didn’t always want to see everything that everyone was up to. It was getting too easy to drown under the noise of too many friends, many of whom probably weren’t your friends at all. So in their infinite wisdom Facebook created different ways to categorise your friends.
Acquaintances
These are people who aren’t quite friends, more like people you know and want to link with but don’t want to hear what they had for breakfast. You can now keep them at arm’s length and dip into their updates as much or as little as you wish.
Lists
(not to be confused with Twitter lists!)
Lists have been around on Facebook for a while but they’ve now become smart lists. These allow you to keep your drunken escapades separate from your family, keep your job hunting updates away from your work colleagues, and ensure that everyone you know is tidied away in their own little group. The clever people at Facebook have kindly set this up for you using information from people’s profiles. You’ll find your workmates and people who live close to you have been grouped without you even having to click your mouse. Lists can also be edited as even Facebook can make the odd mistake – maybe someone on your uni list actually went there thirty years before you. You can also have a restricted list for your boss for instance, who you might not want as a friend but you may want to email from time to time or tag in the odd post.
Groups
Groups are a way to connect and keep up to date with a group of friends, your family or your house mates. They give you a space to upload pictures, have discussions and keep up to date – they’re really a virtual hangout for people who lead busy lives. You can send specific information to people in groups and they can be set up with restricted access or they can be open to all. Hanging out for real is a lot more fun but if you can’t then this is a pretty good substitute.
Business Pages
Facebook has become an important marketing tool. Business pages collect fans via the Like button. Clicking it subscribes the Liker to the business news feed. Having a Facebook page can increase the reach of your business and encourage customer engagement but it also comes with it responsibility. Fans of your page will expect a certain amount of exclusivity, such as announcements, special offers or competitions that aren’t available via any of your other streams (eg your blog, Twitter etc). If the same information just gets regurgitated, what’s in it for your fans?
Subscribers
Your Facebook friends have always been your ‘subscribers’ and likewise you subscribe to your friends, but now you can also follow updates from someone who isn’t your friend. Yes, Facebook has made it easier than ever to stalk people but thankfully this is an opt-in feature and it only relates to content that is marked as public. This lets you follow somebody you don’t know and keep up to date with all of the public updates or announcements they make. As you aren’t friends they would never see your updates unless they chose to follow you back. It’s a bit like Twitter where celebrities end up with masses of followers but they’re selective in return about who they follow back.
LinkedIn is a little more straight forward because people in business don’t have the time to keep up with a complicated social network.
Connections
These are your business contacts, people you’ve met, people you’ve worked for, people you’ve spoken to, people you’re friends with or even people who happen to be a friend of a friend but you feel your services might be of interest.
LinkedIn etiquette involves you having some link or connection to people before you request to connect with them. It’s all very polite so don’t go rushing in thinking it’s like Twitter where anybody and everybody chat about everything. I once read an article that said you might wear your pyjamas to use Twitter, your jeans and t-shirt to use Facebook but to use LinkedIn you really ought to be wearing a suit!
It’s a social network to be taken seriously. You can add updates to LinkedIn to share with your connections but these should be tailored around your business interests and your expertise. Just remember that your clients and potential clients are reading everything you say.
Groups
Groups let you keep up with the latest trends in your field of interest. By taking part in group discussions you can show off your immense expertise and hopefully use this to grow your connections and thus your influence which could lead to your social-network-world-domination.
Companies
Create your own company profile page as a way to reach out to new and existing contacts. Stalk other companies to see what is happening in the industry and look out for opportunities.
Google+
I have to confess, I thought about signing up to Google+ but my days are already full with work, blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking (and did I mention family life in there somewhere?), I just don’t have the head space for another demanding social network. That said, it does something a little different to the other social networks so maybe if it stands the test of time I’ll be persuaded to give it a try.
Circles
Google+ pipped Facebook to the post by allowing you to place your friends and colleagues into circles. The more circles you appear in the more popular you are – work, college friends, local friends, school friends, clients etc – and Google + allows you to share and interact easily with your chosen groups.
It’s more versatile than the new Facebook smart lists, and you can even take part in video chats via the Hangouts option. The Sparks facility allows you to tag interests that you might want to share and also helps Google keep informed of the latest updates on the subjects.
The question is, do you have the time to cultivate a new social network – and more importantly, do your friends? Otherwise you could be left adrift in a circle all on your own.
Social Network Labels
I’ve always been taught that it’s rude to label people but now apparently it’s not. It’s actually rather complimentary; the more labels you have and the more lists you’re on the more popular it means you are. So get out there and start social networking and see if you can put yourself about to be tagged, labelled and categorised and listed. Finally you’ve got an excuse to spend your days online; what are you waiting for?
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