Social media is com­pli­cated. As a guy who is work­ing on a cou­ple of books he wants to sell at some point, there’s a busi­ness rea­son to keep engag­ing peo­ple; build­ing an audi­ence, etc, etc. As a human being, I like being social with some folks, less with oth­ers. As a mis­an­thrope, the masses creep me out and make me want to run scream­ing for the hills. I’ve been told that social media can serve all of these needs (espe­cially scar­ing you so much that you run scream­ing), but how do you use it with­out get­ting lost in the noise? After my post about info­s­ui­cide, one reader told me how his social ser­vice use breaks down:

 I’ve recently been re-evaluating the way I use social media, and try­ing to deter­mine which con­tent works best on one of my blogs and which con­tent belongs on twit­ter, google plus, or even Face­book. I decide mainly based on the audi­ence that each social medium pro­vides. Face­book is mainly fam­ily and offline friends. Google Plus is mainly another group of friends that I know offline. Twit­ter is mainly folks whom I’ve never met. And my per­sonal blog, although it’s the only fully-public one, has an audi­ence of about 5–6 people.

My audi­ence seems to break down this way:

• Twit­ter: Tech-savvy cre­ative peo­ple I’ve met. Mostly pod­cast­ers, pod­cast lis­ten­ers, and soft­ware developers.
• Identi.ca: Hard­core tech­ni­cal users and dig­i­tal rights advocates.
• Face­book: Old friends and acquain­tances, some fam­ily, and a sub­set of the Twit­ter crowd.
• Google Plus: A sub­set of the Twit­ter crowd, plus…who knows what. Seems to me the spam­mers have found G+ and now I have some­thing like 20+ requests a day from peo­ple I’ve never heard of)
• This blog: All of the above

In pro­duc­ing updates for the ser­vices, I’m  post­ing less per­sonal trivia and more con­sid­ered con­tent, even if that con­tent is just links to posts on this blog or The Secret Lair. I enjoy explor­ing a topic with far more than 140 char­ac­ters, and while Face­book and Google+ give you more space, I pre­fer hav­ing this site serve the semi-antiquated pur­pose of a home page, where any­one can find me and my work, and then can branch out to con­sume the con­tent in the medium of their choos­ing, be that Twit­ter, Face­book, or RSS. But is using social ser­vices as a method of syn­di­ca­tion enough? Or is a con­tent cre­ator bet­ter served by hav­ing chan­nels of con­tent that get sent to the appro­pri­ate audi­ence? In the bat­tle for atten­tion, what works best? Is social media a con­ver­sa­tion or a mega­phone? Or both? How do you use the var­i­ous ser­vices?