Groups are simple – Join at least 5. Start with high school, college, professional. Then move onto the good stuff. You MUST join a few “Passion”Groups. What is a “Passion” Group? Basically your hobbies! If you are a runner, find some groups of runners. If you are a Chef, groups on cooking or restaurants. You will find more business in your “hobby” groups by participating, being yourself and sharing your passion. Start today! ( code for Technorati 2N8U3NCHVX4Q )

To continue with the cliches, “the ship has left the port.” If you want to get on board, you are going to need to row out to the boat. Is it too late? No!!! But if you want to do anything interesting this year, you need to have your FaceBook Fan Page, LinkedIn and Twitter in order. You must cover the basics if you want to do anything interesting. Would you hire an intern to launch your TV commercial? It is 2010, GET REAL!!!

As I relieved myself at the Pilot Travel Center off of Intersate 80, heading West thru Pennsylvania on a horribly snowy night, I saw the above advertisement on the wall and smiled. It is GREAT to see a company taking an aggressive approach to building their fan page audience and social presence. Look at your business and take a hard look at your social media presence. Have you included your social links on ALL of your printed collateral? If not, figure out where you can add in this information, it is more important than your physical address and/or phone number. Yeah, I would have added a Twitter account and a LinkedIn Group to the above Advertisement, but that is just me…

Expect a lot of people to complain and request their old FaceBook back. Get over it. Change is good. FaceBook gets that and has continuously evolved their site. Are you using Lists? What about checking your notifications instead of getting emailed every time somebody tags you in a picture or a post? You must start using these networks efficiently, your time is precious.

The odds are very good that you are due for a FaceBook tune-up. Set aside 30 minutes and start by clicking on Settings in the upper right corner, then select Applications. On the drop down menu in the top right select Allowed To Post. I do NOT allow most applications to post to my profile. Do I really want those applications spamming my friends? No. Go down the List and select Edit on any suspicious applications. Your friends will appreciate this!

Go back to Settings in the upper right and select Privacy Settings. Check your Profile Information, I leave all of my settings at Friends Only (except for Pictures and Videos that I leave at Friends of Friends – because this is a great way to find missing friends). Go back to your privacy settings (top left) and select Contact Privacy, I leave all of these as Only Friends (except for Send Me A Message and Add Me – these I leave as Everyone so people can contact me). Is this making sense? Now go to Applications and Websites under Privacy settings. This section is Crazy! Why would you want all of this information shared? I unselected all of these except for online presence and status updates.

Go back to Settings in the upper right and select Account Settings. You can select Notifications on the top bar. Do you really need to get emails for everything happening on FaceBook? If you check in on FaceBook regularly, you do not need to get any notifications via email. If you are using Lists (hello organization) and your notifications tab on the bottom right, this is a prime opportunity to remove notifications. Use your time more efficiently! Then select FACEBOOK ADS on the top right of the bar. I select Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to No one. It is kind of annoying that you have to do this. At the bottom of this page I allow Show my social actions in Facebook Ads to Only My Friends. Why? Because I want FaceBook to make money on advertising and I think these Ads are actually interesting (yes, I want to know if you are a fan of whatever local restaurant). This is the system truly working in balance!

Now that you have checked in on your settings and privacy, select your Profile, Info and edit your settings. Add the last few books you have read or movies you have seen. Make sure your education and work history are accurate. This information is critical, share your professional experiences with your community. You can copy and paste from your LinkedIn profile here, but get that information into your profile! Oh yeah, try and enjoy doing all of this. Tuning up your profile is important and strangely comforting. Take control of your FaceBook experience today!

How should you be using Lists? Create a list for your local area, look thru your followers and add them to this List. Yeah this takes time and brings on Carpal Tunnel. Your List become really useful for filtering thru all of the noise and finding out what the people in your network are talking about quickly. If you are feeling aggressive you can add people you are only following to Lists as well and increase the odds of them following you back. You can make a List for whatever your niche is, you don’t have to limit them to location. As you look for followers, check Lists by relevant people and find Lists that work for you. Look thru the people they are following on the List and find new relevant people to follow. This is a great way to fish for followers in your very own niche specific local pond.

Oh yeah, check out the new location based topic trending, it is kind of interesting. Cleveland is not on the map yet, but it was interesting to look at a few cities and see what people are talking about there. Start playing with search, hashtags and lists on Twitter – You will find these to be very valuable tools in your social media utility belt.

The new number is 2.5 billion photos per month! Holy Cow, Batman! Can we simply call FaceBook a Photo Sharing website? This is ridiculous! I am guessing FaceBook is now well over 20 billion photos on the site (the last number I recall was 15 billion). Notably missing is an update to the amount of videos being uploaded monthly. The last update was 10 million videos with an average running time of a minute. This number may be too small for FaceBook to brag about; however, the potential for video in FaceBook has never been greater.

Increasingly FaceBook is a source of entertainment and social interaction, as proven by the numbers. The ability to watch live video shows and comment with your friends will bring a whole new dimension to FaceBook. CNN experimented with this during the presidential inauguration a year ago on FaceBook. It rocked. You Tube did their Live show, then the Live U2 show from the Rose Bowl. O.k, it wasn’t FaceBook and I had nobody online to chat with at 2 am (damn west coast shows), but that really rocked. If I was Conan O’Brien, I’d take my show to FaceBook and leave the networks behind. FaceBook is NOW, are you participating?

As reported by FaceBook:

More than 350 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 55 million status updates posted each day
More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events created each month
More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Average user has 130 friends on the site
Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
Average user is invited to 3 events per month
Average user is a member of 12 groups

The only auto-following behavior Twitter allows is auto-follow-back (following a user after they have followed you). Automated un-following is also not permitted. If you find yourself frequently needing to un-follow large numbers of users, you might consider reviewing your criteria for following them. Please review our Follow Rules and Best Practices for a detailed discussion of following recommendations. Twitter Rules. I do not believe Dossy violated Twitters Guidelines. Quite the opposite he enabled a manual bulk unfollowing system. There is nothing automatic in his process. Part of your criteria for Twitter should be the person you follow must follow you back, otherwise you are simple experiencing a one way conversation. Twitter, go after the bad guys and spammers, Dossy did not enable spamming or the ever so annoying auto DM, for the most part he built a very useful tool that enables you to quickly and easily manage your Twitter account.

In a perfect world (or at least community) we would all follow each other. I have seen this work with varying degree of effectiveness on some micro-communities I am a member of. There is a real world issue here I am still working thru, are you initiating contact? Do you contact your friends and network and check-in with them/make plans. It has become so easy to run thru life seeing people randomly or once a year, work and kids keep us so busy we become lazy with everything else. Find different ways to make plans, coffee before work, breakfast, lunch, drinks after work, a ballgame, meeting of mutual interest, workout at the gym. These are all easy ways to extend your social life. You don’t have to bulk unfollow the real world friends you have that do not make an effort to make plans; be a leader and make plans with them. Stay Social.

The going rate appears to be .45-.50 cents to advertise to people within 25 miles of Cleveland. How many people are there on FaceBook within 25 miles of Cleveland? According to FaceBook 596,760! Of which, 335,180 are women, 18 and older. Looking to reach women 30 and over, you have 203,600 potential fans! Within 50 miles of Cleveland we have 800,00 people on FaceBook. Are these your potential customers?  Business has never been more social…