» One social tool to rule them all

If you had only one social tool, if you were not allowed to use anything else, what would you choose? Which tool would you not be able to live without?

I was asked this as a hypothetical question the other day, but then I realized as I formulated my answer, there is a real and serious side to the question as well.

No, I do not think that some government agency is going to ration our access to social media, ha. But all the same, we do need to know where to place our priorities. Time is precious, and it is a finite resource. Being able to decide which of the many tools and services we can make best use of and which we can ignore is an important and valuable question.

Fact is each person or business is going to choose differently. There is no one-size-fits-all answer.

If you are exclusively working in business to business recruitment then you might find LinkedIn is a good choice. LinkedIn is where business people and professionals hang out, and many people on there are actively or passively looking for new opportunities.

On the other hand, if you are exclusively looking to the social media landscape for consumer-facing reasons, you might get a better result from FaceBook, and to a less popular extent lately, MySpace. Although you do find business people on FaceBook, those services are way more consumer friendly than LinkedIn, and are where you are going to find everyone from your Mum to your teenage nephew.

Your emphasis might be on reading and posting content. Staying up with the news and seeing all the cool things that are being shared. You might be really into politics, tech or science, and the social part might be subordinate to the information. On the other hand, you might be all about getting traffic to your website. If these are more your style then social voting and social bookmarking would be the thing for you. Although people do have conversations, make friends, and interact in social bookmarking, that is not the primary reason to join them. Each niche or subject will have a social bookmarking site, or you can go to the big boys like Digg and Reddit for sites that cover many wide interest categories.

My choice? That would be Twitter. I chose Twitter very quickly and told my friends the answer almost instinctively. As I thought about it more I decided it was the right choice for me, and when I look at my workflow it does stand out as my most visited social tool.

Here are my reasons:

1. Twitter provides me news via links and retweets
2. I can network with business people through Twitter conversations and by searching for users
3. Both business people and consumers use Twitter, especially since Oprah and Ashton
4. You can drive a good amount of traffic to your website using Twitter
5. Best of all, Twitter is fun! Twitter is my water cooler, it is how I socialize in between bouts of working

Which is your favorite social media service? If you had to choose one, which would it be? Please share in the comments …