The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

What’s in It for You?

Interpersonal refers to the many applications and websites in the social media ecosphere that allow us to communicate live and in real time between individuals, small groups, or large groups. Choosing an interpersonal tool starts with two questions: What do you want to communicate, and with whom do you want to communicate it?

Talking to people in your social network easily and naturally is fun, and helps develop deeper relationships between people—most of the tools here are free for personal or small group use. When people are in business settings, there are significant productivity benefits to be gained from real-time communication, and investment in tools to help build relationships is well worth the price. Many of these tools can significantly reduce or even eliminate expenses like long-distance telephone calls, airfare, and hotels for companies. Also, with the emergence of mobile devices, people can now communicate at their desk or on the go with the same application and the same individuals.

Since the first edition of this book was published, video has exploded onto the social media scene and is now powering many new innovative video conferencing applications, and sharing applications are also gaining popularity as ways to collaborate with your social network. We’ve redrawn the categories in this chapter to reflect those changes. We look at a range of applications from free to enterprise-level, and from the well known to some of the latest up-and-coming ...