One of my passion areas is Social Media, I believe that it has not only fundamentally changed the way we engage with each other but is slowly unlocking the potential of organizations to connect with, engage with and serve their employees and customers in great ways.

So let me start by providing my definition of social media, simply I see it as a range of tools designed to connect people together for varying purposes. To deep dive further Facebook , twitter, etc don’t care if you post a picture, a status update or post a link, they care that you are using their social media tool and connecting with people. Of course there are some commercial drivers why a social media site wants you on their site, but we will cover that in another post.

A social media platform helps you engage with people one-to-one, one-to-many, one-to-all in simple and easy to access methods. Indeed more and more people today are connecting to social media sites through their data capable mobile device.

The reason social media has taken off is because it allows us to connect with friends, communities and to do so in a way that is convenient, simple and in real time.

The global trend with many of the leading social media platforms is to increase their ability to embed themselves in to your “now” so that they you are always connected and interacting through their site.

So if the premise that social media is just hype, a fad, or a passing trend was true then it would have died years ago, instead it has grown much faster than the Radio, TV and the internet itself.

According to Erik Qualman of Socialnomics in America Facebook now has more weekly traffic than Google, 1 in 5 couples couples met online and if Facebook was a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world.

So sure it’s here to stay, let me assume you agree with that, but perhaps you are still wondering why on earth you would actually use it. So let me share with you how I use it.

Socially I use it for a number of reasons, including connecting with friends across the world, sharing with my friends and followers real time experiences, getting advice on an outfit in real time, setting up after work drinks, anything and everything basically.

Professionally I use it as a source of information and to promote myself professionally. If I am looking to find out some information quickly, to validate some data, I can post it on social media and within minutes (or seconds) I can have links to information sources or indeed the answer itself. I have also secured a number of paid gigs through my professional use of social media.

At the end of the day social media is whatever you want it to be. It can be a powerful tool that helps you professionally and socially or it can just be a time waster. Like anything you only will get out of it what you put in to it.

So while I love social media and it has so much potential I must stress that social media is not now, nor should it ever be, a replacement for face-to-face in person contact with people in your life. It is simply a tool to help you to connect with others in an efficient and real-time manner.

I look forward to hearing your social media success stories.

Enjoy.