facebook has over 100 000 000 users, the majority of whom stand in the corner and watch. Back in the day when IRC was the think, we called people like this lurkers. They listen but say little. At parties I am guessing these are the wall flowers.

facebook is a great place for networking, chatting to old school friends and catching up with whats happening in your world. Marketers will tell you that facebook is a huge untapped resource of referral business. It could be but facts are that the passivity of the users will nullify any real results.

Networking  well would change that. Networking does not mean you should stand in the corner shouting out an advert over and over.  I see this with many marketers. I am active on stumble upon and I see traffic driven to my site because of my interaction with others.

Facebook sends me a fair amount of traffic because I interact with others.  You have noticed links like share, I like it and various others on blogs websites and on the social media sites. These are there so that you can help spread the word. If you like something you should be sharing it with your friends, followers and other hangers on.

The more you share, the more you interact, the more you become part of the community the more your networking will succeed.  I have noticed a disturbing trend for people to link all of their social media activities. For example they will post something on facebook and automatically send it to every other social media site.

It means that if I am your friend on facebook, twitter and friendfeed, everything is duplicated and triplicated. You ill get similar results as I get from Friend Feed. I have not yest seen any traffic from friend feed because even though I have been a member for a few years and my stuff regularly gets posted there, I am not a part of that community.

facebook, twitter, muti, Digg, Reddit and sites like this are about quality not quantity.  If you are standing in the corner shouting, you will be ignored. As someone pointed out, you will make far more friends by being interested in others, than showing an interest in only yourself.

In order to see results from your social media, start sharing today.

PS The 10 reasons in the title was a lie.

More on this subject

• Hit and Run driver found using social media.
• Social Media and Networking: Rules of engagement
• Is Twitter the biggest waste of time ever?
• Magpie will destroy Twitter

Aggregators

With aggregators there is no need to submit individual blogs as the aggregator will use your XML or RSS feed to collect information from your blog. Every time you create a new article or blog entry the aggegators will post them automatically. The only effort needed with aggregators is visiting them and voting for the entries.

Amatomu

Afrigator

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites do not as a rule have a voting system except for how many people have bookmarked a site or article. Sites like these generally have a manual submission button and don’t ask for much in the way of information. Your bookmarks are logged under your username and other people with similar interest will become friendly with you. They will then look at your bookmarks and in all likelihood bookmark them as well.

Del.icio.us

Stumble Upon

Social Networking

In some cases this is a misnomer. In my opinion the only reason for calling these sites social networking sites is the social element of people visiting and voting. The social element however can be subject to collusion on some of the smaller sites like MUTI. Sadly Muti does bring results for some of my clients but the collusion has led to the banning of a few sites. Be very aware that there are many of these sites that have unwritten rules. You may think because the input forms ask for the authors input they would accept the authors submission of his or her own articles. Because MUTI is an unfriendly Social Networking site I am excluding them from this list.

Digg

Reddit

SABloggerOne of my clients has been banned despite never having posted a blog here so I think there is a link to the MUTI clique. Maybe they will stay on this list but we will have to see.

fark

News Vine

True Social Networking

Face Book

Those should keep you busy for a while, Register, find me, add me as a friend. In the next few days we will visit each of these in turn and show you how to use them effectively.

More on this subject

• Social media is a fail: 10 reasons why
• Some things I have learnt about Social networking
• Qassia, Social Networking with full follow links.
• Luddites, Fools and Mixit

My kids are savvy because I have warned them against communicating with strange people, Getting rid of those you don’t want to communicate with is a matter of setting some options, But I love MIXIT because it saves me a load of money. You see all that communication would be done using SMS if it weren’t for MIXIT.

I too have my preferred methods of communication, Theres Twitter, my email, my various RSS feeds. I am guessing that all of these tools could be used for nefarious purposes, In fact I am willing to lay money on that.  Another tool that gets used for communication is Facebook. In fact on facebook theres a group that wants to close MIXIT By their own logic they should petition for the closing of Facebook. I bet that there is a group in their somewhere with a totally innocuous name that is invite only filled with paedophiles, I am betting you will find a group of gangstas in there as well discussing the next drive by shooting. So I say lets ban paper, People use it to print pornography, Ban telephones, ADSL, SMS Technology, what about talking. People use all these methods to promote their perversions.

Seriously folks wake up and smell those pretty pink flowers.

More on this subject

• Social media is a fail: 10 reasons why
• Is internet search engine marketing rocket science?
• Social Media and Networking: Rules of engagement
• Hotel Web design – Getting bang for your buck