Thoughts about social media have been rumbling through my head lately. How much is necessary? Which ones are most effective? Do we do them just because we’re told we should? There’s a list now of what? Like 50?

Here’s Sierra Godfrey and a bit about what she thinks.

But of all the social media outlets I use, Facebook has been the most troubling.

Facebook’s main problems, in my opinion, are two things: privacy and accounts. Facebook forces anyone who wants to have a public face (by public I mean published author, celebrity, or anyone else in the public, accessible domain) and still interact with people on a personal level to have Fan pages, which are clunky to use and administrate. Worse, if you want to interact with a certain set of people, like say colleagues and coworkers, and also keep a separate set of people like your drinking buddies, you can’t.

Facebook will probably be the first to tell you that they aren’t built for people with public and private lives–like authors–and yet authors and businesses use it. They have to. Well, MySpace certainly isn’t doing anyone any favors! It’s against Facebook’s user policy to have two accounts, so you can’t even try to keep separate circles through accounts. It’s a huge failing in my opinion, and why I no longer use Facebook for my writing social media.

Recently I read this article by Andrew Keen about Facebook’s “creepy” mode of revenue, which consists of sharing our personal data to advertisers. Keen argues passionately that “the impact of Facebook on our privacy is deeply worrying…Many other people are now worrying about Facebook’s cult of radical transparency and its willful disregard for privacy.”

Later, she goes on to say:

This is certainly something to think about–and if I’m honest, it’s been simmering at the back of my mind for some time. It’s why I refuse to “allow” any apps to access my private information for any reason on Facebook, ever. It’s why I no longer use  Facebook as part of my public online footprint–Sierra Godfrey the writer. It just doesn’t afford me the kind of inner and outer sharing I’d prefer. For my private use of Facebook, I don’t engage in any apps that access my info, and I have delisted myself from public view. But is Facebook ever really private?

Read the full article at her blog.

How do you use Facebook? It seems if you want be an author on FB then you have to let it all hang out. No privacy. Or do fan pages solve that problem?

How effective are FB fan pages?