Most of the social media guru’s I follow have the same advice to business people trying to figure out and harness this new-fanged social media stuff: get your hands dirty and use it. Good advice, but I think it needs to be a little more specific.

Get out there and use it as yourself not your business. Seems obvious, right? But it’s an important distinction to make. The best way to learn how this stuff works is to use it like everyone else is using it: to communicate with your family, find long lost friends, follow your favorite band or sports team, don’t sign up and immediately start trying to use it to market your business, that can come later, once you understand how it works.

Let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter, two services that most everyone has heard about now, and I’ll use myself as an example. I’m a slightly different case than most people because I’ve been on the internet nearly as long as it’s been around, but all this social media stuff was just as new to me as it was to everyone else and I was a fairly reluctant participant.

I signed up on Facebook, found a few friends, wrote a few comments on my wall and kind of stalled out. Then I found a couple of old high school friends that I’d been out of touch with for years. That got me interested again. Now, I use Facebook to chat with those friends and follow what they are up to. Remember, you can put your photos up there, you can do every poll that your friends send you, you can play every game that comes along, or you can pass on all that.

Twitter’s a different beast all together (and a lot of people are trying to figure out what kind of beast it is). I follow a few of my friends that tweet; I follow my pro soccer team; I follow a few of the podcasters I listen to. Every once in awhile I tweet something, but not very often. Many people like the fact that they can have a conversation on twitter, I’m not on it often enough to do that, but I read some of the conversations of the people I follow.

So, get out there and get a Facebook account, play around with it a little. Go get a twitter account and see if any of your favorite celebrities or sports teams or authors are tweeting, follow them for a bit, see what you think. Remember, you don’t have to accept every friend request on Facebook and if you follow someone and they are inundating your twitter stream with inane chatter, stop following them.

Both services will walk you through getting started. When you write your profile, remember you’re writing about you, not about your business. Also remember that everything you’re writing is public, pretty much anyone can read it.