I recently asked the question, “Do You Hate That You Love Facebook?” in the general Q & A section of LinkedIn, and as anticipated, received many responses. Some were quite interesting. A few confirmed the love-hate relationship. Others expressed love for personal use, but hate for business purposes. And some focused on the dependency of having to check Facebook, almost incessantly. I thought it would be fun to share some of the responses here. Upon reading the same, please feel free to share your thoughts.
This response was from a Senior Vice President who stated, “The only thing I hate is that FB is addictive! I spend way too much time blogging about nothing & the not important things in my life, as well as making comments on others’ profiles than I should. Years ago, we spent time outside – now we are glued to our computers. I am off on vacation tomorrow for the weekend – and decided not to take my computer along. Since I am not a Blackberry or iPhone user – it’ll be a real test…”
A Business Development Manager added, “No emotional attachment to Facebook or whatsoever..just another online tool to connect with friends and family overseas and former classmates…. nice to check out the apps once in a while and add some amusement in reading funny statuses from people..and sometimes expressing myself too…just a tool but not something I can’t live without :)”
An entrepreneur and self-professed non-executive stated, “Sometimes i am confused as to exactly why i love it / like it and other times i hate that i cant work out why i am using it….Every now and again i realise that there are moments when i love it (its a nugget of insight or a lost connection)”
A Virtual Assistant posted one of the longer responses… “I like that I like Facebook. I actually don’t love it. I keep a Facebook page and a Facebook Fan Page for business. The issues some have mentioned can be easily remedied using the many available features on FB now…segmenting friends into lists, setting up a Fan page with using the FBML app that truly represents your business, connecting it to LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Facebook is a very valuable tool for driving traffic to your business web site or blog. It is so flexible, now, though you have filter and segment it so that you only see what you want to see and share what you want to share to who you want to share it with. There is no need to ever be bothered with comments, posts, etc. that are not relevant for you.”
A retired manager exclaimed, “Facebook has very little utility any more for me, particularly for business. It is compromising its security with frivolous features that defy focus, foster meaningless exchanges and updates every time someone breaks a fingernail. Other than for close family contacts, pictures of the cute kids in my relationship and staying in touch with family, it is annoying beyond belief. My address book is shrinking to a bare minimum.”
A Plilanthropic Advisor pronounced, “I love that I love Facebook! I just don’t use it for anything related to business or e-commerce. I’m a serial contact purger – if we haven’t talked in person or on the phone or by email in the past year, I purge that person from my friend list until that happens. Try to keep it to 100 friends or less that I’m actively in touch with. Simply purge out the people who have annoying updates and that seems pretty rare right now. Love the updates, love the humor, love the photos that my friends post and love staying connected to people and groups that I like.”
A Lead Business Analyst responded, “I like that I hate it as I bailed out.. too much serial status updaters with useless information – such as “I cooked pot roast for dinner” and too many people I hardly knew in high school acting like we were best friends.”
And this, from a Chief Marketing Strategist, “As Marketing platforms, can we hate unlogical Reality TV shows? As Marketing platforms, do we still use yellow pages, neighborhood brochures etc? If above questions makes us think, then we can’t hate Facebook. No matter how useful or useless, no matter how simple of complex, no matter how time consuming or efficient, if a platform has 550 million users, 2/3rd people, 14 and above as part of it, one of the top traffic generators to your website (when you see analytics for referral site), marketing personal or business operator for sure need to be serious about it. Now how to optimize and utilize these numbers to our benefit, is what differentiates between the “Yes” or “No” of this answer. Having said that, I’m no Facebook fan, neither I have been able to optimize it fully for my business yet, but for sure we are getting more and more out of it every day.”
*This post was originally published on this site March 2011
Acceler8Success Cafe 
Facebook has definitely proved to be one of the best social networks of the past couple of years. In some aspects, it is practically unsurpassed, and undoubtedly very influential.
The pace at which social media tools are being developed exceeds the capacity of most educational communities to assimilate and accept use of such tools as effective practice… The key pitfall is potentially leading too far outside a zone of proximal development and creating high degrees of frustration as a result.