Okay, that’s highly unlikely to happen but believe it or not, that is exactly what some of your Facebook friends feel like when your Status Updates contain characters like #@rt! that they do not understand.

Just to get the proper perspective, people use social media for various reasons. Take Facebook for instance. Some people use it to connect with family and friends (even their stalkers). Some use it to connect with their schoolmates or co-workers. Yet another group use it for business. A very interesting portion of them use it for all of the above.

With this in mind, how do you balance your personal relationships with your business relationships? A few people actually maintain more than one profile on a variety of social media platforms. However, I think the greater majority would agree that that would be somewhat of a tedious task to undertake. I would say that a general norm would be that it is acceptable for your elementary school friends or your neighbor to be your friend on Facebook, just as long as they understand that you are there for business (read No Pillow Fight Invitations).

My Facebook Status Updates originate from Twitter 99% of the time. The characters you see above would most likely be from a friend that updates their status via Twitter. I would say that majority of my friends on both Facebook and Twitter would understand my Twitter lingo. After all, it is a somewhat conventional practice to be connected on more than one social media platform. However, there is that tiny percentage that I probably drive crazy. My one Facebook friend (we actually used to be in high school together) even went as far as making up his own Status Updates that included a little bit of everything he had seen in my updates. Irony is, he is a dentist – am working on showing him how social media can work wonders for his business.

So what is that # sign I keep seeing anyway?  The # sign is known as the hashtag symbol in Twitter and is used to denote a topic on Twitter. It is user defined and it is created by quite simple as just placing the symbol # in front of a topic e.g. #superbowl. My Status Update could be “Warner just hit Fitzgerald for a 42 yard touchdown #superbowl”. Anybody who sees my Status Update would recognize that I was referencing the Superbowl. The hashtag #superbowl makes it easier to do searches. A “#superbowl” search would yield far greater results than a “Warner” or a “Fitzgerald” search.

A @ sign directs your Status Update to a specified user. A Twitter update that has an @kevinkute anywhere in it is directed towards me. I could easily find any references to my username with any of the many Twitter applications or via the Twitter search engine.

Finally, there is RT. RT is short for retweet. In Twitter terms, retweet simply means that you are repeating a tweet by someone else. Why would you want to repeat something that someone else said, you might ask. If you hear something that you thought would be helpful to others, wouldn’t you want your friends to know about it? By retweeting, you are not only sharing with your friends, but you are also acknowledging the original poster of the message.

Hopefully as a Facebook user you will now be able to make some sense of the Status Updates of that friend that always seems to use language you can’t quite seem to understand.