Recently one of my
friend introduced me to one of his friends who had similar interests as
mine. At the time of leaving she asked me my Facebook username so that
she can add me as a friend. We also exchanged our twitter handle so
that we can follow each other. After she was gone, I was wondering
that gone are the days when people used to ask for phone numbers to get
in touch and now new way of interaction is social networking sites.
But there are so many social networking sites over the web that
sometimes it gets difficult to decide whether you should create an
account on it or not. We have analyzed and listed top 5 social
networking sites on which you should definitely have an account , if you
don’t have one already.
Facebook
Founded in 2004 in Harvard University and having more than 600 million active users,
Facebook tops the chart of all social networking sites. Facebook’s rank as per Alexa is #2 which is second to none other than Google.
Popularity of Facebook made its CEO Mark Zuckerberg as world’s youngest billionaire and he was also named as Time magazine’s
Person of the Year 2010.
On Facebook, users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal
interests & other personal information. They can communicate with
friends and other users through private or public messages and chat
feature. Every user has a wall on which he can post his status updates ,
and news feed will feature post and updates from
his friends. Facebook email id has also added an emailing feature to
this social networking website. One should definitely have an account on
Facebook.
Google Plus
When few days ago Google launched its ‘
plus one button‘ for the web who would knew that it’s the start of a new social networking from
Google. Google Plus launched in an invite only testing phase a few days ago in late May 2011, is giving direct competition to
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Facebook. Service was suspended in a day after extremely huge demand for accounts. Some of the major features of Google plus are
Circles : You
can create circles for grouping purpose and then drag & drop
contacts to add them in desired circles. You can decide the sharing
level for each circle.
Streams: This feature is similar to Facebook wall and is used to post status updates and receive updates from your circles.
Hangout: Google
plus has brought video chatting to its social networking and has also
given an option to do group video chat up to 10 people. You create a
hangout and invite friends to join in.
Google Plus is in its initial stage and as its a product from a company
that is highly trusted , its definitely going to get a huge user base.
We have to wait and watch to see how it will impact Facebook’s supremacy
in social networking. Go ahead and try creating an account as soon as
you get an invite.
Twitter
Twitter offers
social networking and micro blogging service, enabling its users to
send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts up to
140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page. Twitter is
estimated to have 200
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million users and it is also used by many business to promote their brand and get followers.
Users can follow people,
brands and other twitter handles which are of their interests.
Many users on twitter remain inactive and just follow the updates from
the one whom they follow. Short list of following and long list of
followers generally means a good social influence. e.g Lady Gaga wears
the title of currently having more than 11379670 followers and still
growing. Justin Bieber is second and followed by Barack Obama in third
position.
LinkedIn
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LinkedIn
is a professional network service launched in 2003 and currently has
more than 100 million users. Company’s has slogan of “Relationships
Matter” and it allows users to maintain a list of contact details of
people with whom they have some level of relationship called
Connections.
This list of
connections can be used in a number of ways e.g. used to find jobs,
people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one’s
contact network, employers can list jobs and search for potential
candidates, job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and
discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.
Klout
So now you have created accounts of these major network and have created lots of connections and made new friends.
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You might interact with them quite often but you don’t know how much they are influenced by you. It is here that role of
Klout becomes
important. Klout is service which provides social media analytics i.e
it measures your influence across different social networks. Currently
it can be linked with your Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn account.
A
score of 0-100 is given to users based on their social network
interactions and how much other people interact on the content shared by
the user. Usually celebrities have a Klout score
of above 70. You should definitely have an account on Klout if you are
using any of the supported social networking sites.