September 20, 2010 Understanding the Real Life Social Network When you hear the growth figures for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Facebook recently surpassed 500 million users (that’s half a billion, folks – more than the populations of the US, Canada, and Mexico combined), and Twitter reports 300,000 new accounts per day. With all the chatter going on in the social sphere, what can small businesspeople like us do to keep from becoming just so much white noise? For starters, we need to put the numbers in context. Just because there are 500 million users on Facebook, that doesn’t mean we need…