Cross Pollinate Your Social Network

The Twitter community is freaking out today. Twitter apparently “misplaced” a number of friends and followers. To the concerned; Pop a chill pill and take some notes.

Yes, I am afraid so. Your Twitter followers have been cut by 10-20% and irregular number reporting isn’t a surprise. Wake up call!

Twitter, a service that goes down weekly, should not be your only database of contacts. Solution: Cross pollinate your social networks and make sure you have a database of contacts backed up somewhere that you control.

Many of us have back up copies of our hard drives, websites, and address books. So too should we back up our social media database.

Don’t be naive. ‘Cross Pollinate’ your social networks.

It is this simple:

When you get a follower on Twitter, add them to LinkedIn & Facebook
When you develop a personal relationship with a client, make sure you use a CRM like Highrise to back up all your info
Keep backup copies of your database in multiple locations (stored locally & on the server).

Having a well built social network, spanning more than just one site (like Facebook) is proving to be more important when realities like the Twitter data loss set in. I have been expanding my network from Twitter to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Highrise (database) and now I could care less if one service loses all my data. I have them backed up.

Soon data portability will advance to the point where we can simply export our network of friends. Or even better, there will be one central database that talks to all these services. Until then, don’t let the investment in your network be wasted by a couple of programmer mishaps. Take the matter into your own hands and build a redundant network of your friends. Not only will you sleep easier at night, but your network will be that much more powerful when you can participate in more than one platform.