I hear comments all the time about people who think using social sites to communicate back and forth frequently is ridiculous. Non-users think we are just sitting in front of the computer or playing on our phones all day everyday.

‘Those people can’t possibly be a fully functioning member of society, they are always texting, Facebooking and tweeting. ”

“People don’t even talk anymore!”

Some of that is very true. The under 30/ tech saavy crowd is very much into nonverbal socializing. I have to admit, I would rather send a DM, email or text than call someone and leave a voice mail.

With that being said, social sites are a great place to gather and even meet new people. If you are having a birthday party for example, you can send an invite out to all of your friends. They can RSVP giving you a a ballpark number of people attending.

If you are having an event, you can ask people to use a specific hashtag when they tweet about it during the event. This makes it easy for people who could not attend to keep up with what is going on. Also if you need to go back and find out what people were talking about, you can do a search for that hashtag.

Social media sites are actually streamlining real life relationships. It is easier than ever for people to reconnect with, communicate and share with a larger number of people than ever before. (I have regained contact with people from grade school I never thought I would see again.) These same sites are also decreasing the degree of separation. You can now meet new people from all over the globe creating new friendships and networks never before possible.

To help you reconnect or find new people  here are a couple tools for you to play with. I would recommend you take a look at the recent post on promoting an event for free. It has some more apps and ideas for meeting people.

Listerous

Twitter Lists are great was to find a larger group of people with the same interests. People are always congregating around topics they are passionate about. As an example, I typed in soccer. I got 62 different Twitter lists talking about soccer.

Twitter Search

There seems to be two places to search for information these days, Google and Twitter. Twitter is more “real time” than Google is. What I find very helpful when using search.twitter.com, is using the what are called operators. Simply put, operators are just ways to get more exact search results. Here is a list of Twitter search operators. The parts in red are the required parts; the rest of the words are replaced with your search terms.

Google Search

If you didn’t know, Google search has lots of cool ways to narrow down searches. If you are interested look on the Google Search Help site. For now, the one you will want to write down is site:twitter.com/*/enter keyword here. When you replace [enter keyword here] with the word soccer for example you will get over 250 lists relating to soccer. Check it out, here is a Google Search link.

The above example site:twitter.com/*/enter keyword here would also work if it were site:facebook.com/*/enter keyword here or site:linkedin.com/*/enter keyword here or any site you want to search. Use some creativity in your searches to come up with really interesting groups of people.

Some of these search methods may be a little advanced. I am not implying you need to memorize them all. You can bookmark these sites or this post and use it as a reference. If you remember one or two of them that fit your needs, you are set.

How do you use social media sites to enhance your real world social life?

image credit CraigMarston