Have you ever thought about the numbers? Seriously sit back and think about this for one second. Right now, there are over one billion chat messages sent each day on Facebook.

That’s ONE BILLION- 1,000,000,000. In. One. Day.

Or how about this, there are over two billion tweets that have been sent since May of 2007, with the daily average growing!

That’s 2,000,000,000. I alone have sent 910 of them. Go me.

I just find it absolutely amazing that all this communication is constantly going on. Much like our dads on the golf course hitting balls and talking about life, these social media apps are allowing us to be connected and share life. Regardless if a friend is next door or a cousin 3,000 miles away, social media connects us.

Here’s the thing, one may sit there and say- “Well, I don’t want to tell people where I am every 15 minutes of the day” or the flip side “Nobody CARES where I am all the time.” I respectfully disagree. If you are involved with a business, a club, church, organization, family, friends, or simply have any sort of life involving two or more people, you should can be involved in social media like Twitter and Facebook. It’s going to be our new communication.

Now, many ad agencies, companies and pretty much every web “expert” is trying to figure out how how to make money using these technologies. If you go to twitter’s about page, you’ll see a message concerning how they make money.

“Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”

Basically- they don’t make any money. None, well negative actually. Not a good business model.

So why should one engage with this technology if they aren’t going to make money ? Well, I believe those that enter the social media world with expectations of making money are in it for the wrong reasons. Social media is about engaging your brand with your audience. It’s about communication.

There’s a local cafe that is on twitter (@caffeposto) where I live and I can honestly say they set an excellent example of using a social media like twitter to communicate their brand, get followers and engage with people in the community. Unlike other smaller cafe’s out there on twitter in my area, they aren’t always bombarding me with marketing messages and special deals that they have going on. CaffePosto is engaging with people, events, weather, anything and throwing their brand in the mix every now and then.

Here’s another thing to consider, social media is super time consuming. Getting over 900 tweets has taken me a lot of time, a bunch of different apps and a lot of messages. Some people out there are crazy about this stuff, posting all the time, sitting in front of a computer telling us everything about their life and updating 24/7. I’ve never been that crazy, but close. I feel if there is something worth adding value to my followers, I’m sending it. Nobody cares if I’m off to the pool at noon on a Tuesday. That’s just poor twitter-etiquette.

So if you want to jump on board the social media train, and you need to now before all of your ids are taken by competitors or others with your name, you need to ensure that you are doing it for the right reasons. If you are a business thanking about your outreach, stick to your brand messages 1 out of 20 tweets, the other 19 should be about solid engagement of others around you.