Social networking sites come in many guises and forms. I am going to tell you about the various sites and then you need to join them. During the next few weeks we will go into more detail on each one. At this stage I want you to visit them and register. Look at the various submission guidelines if they exist. Compare the voting systems.

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.

After having spent some time around social networking sites here are a few things I have learned.

You have different types of people and they have different agendas. Some people seem to think that anything commercial is bad, this is not what social sites are for. Some seem to think that spamming these sites is OK, Thats what they are there for, right?

I think the the word social networking is a misnomer in many instances, sure Facebook is a social site, but its also used by many as a business networking tool. As a method of keeping your teams up to date, can it be beaten?

Digg, Reddit et al are referred to in that genre as well, but the most popular information available on these sites is anything but social. Its normally news or tech. That makes me think that social is the wrong word to use.

The new kid on the SA scene is SA Blogger. On day one the most popular post was a political news story, hardly social is it?

But back to the point of this article, Social networking can be good for your business if you become a part of the community. Some communities will reject you without thinking about what you have to offer but a lesson long forgotten, that needs to be revived is the art of lurking. In the old days in IRC people would join the chat rooms and lurk until they understood the dynamic of the room. Only then would they start taking part. I think this would be a good strategy for some of the smaller social networking sites.

I recently learnt about the unwritten rules propogated by the community. On one Social networking site self submission is frowned upon. In fact it is not frowned upon, it is actively targeted and killed. The lesson here is that sites that have that type of mentality and membership for want of a better word will implode.

They chase away new people with their attitudes and superior knowledge. Noobs need guidance not heavy handedness. It’s amazing throughout the history of the net, noobs have been sneered at by supercillious all knowing old timers. Strange how quickly they forget that they were also noobs once upon a time. Fortunately not all old timers suffer from this niche superiority complex and some noobs will survive the initial hazing and stupidity.

Lets make today, “Be nice to a Noob day” shall we.

Join Qassia by clicking here, add intels and get fully juiced backlinks. I don’t often get excited by Social networking sites anymore because I have found them to be a lot of hardwork for very little result. I have a few sites that I use regularly and I get reasonable results from.

Other I use purely because I get back links from them. Qassia is a similar concept to squidoo and hubpages in that you need to add intels and get your back links that way. I know that the concept works because my rankings have improved because of my lenses and hubs.

Qassia however has a very strict no spam policy. You can open only one account, and every intel is checked by a human as I understand it. It is my belief that Qassia will be great as a source of information as well as a great place to get some good back links.

They allow you to earn Qassia dollars for various activities, giving you more prominence on their site, thus more traffic. Yes I think joining Qassia is a must