My main activity is running and promoting websites so I have spent a lot of time learning how to build traffic to a website organically ie. not paying for traffic with pay per click services and also doing it legitimately and not subscribing to link farms. I check frequently to understand where traffic is coming from and which pages it is landing on.

Increasingly I\’m getting traffic referred by Twitter and also through my blog, Facebook less so and LinkedIn rarely but there could be a number of reason for this such as the level of activity that I put into each network site.

Social networking is fundamentally different to blogging in that a blog pumps out information to whoever wants to read it. Readers have the option to subscribe to a blog if they find the information there useful and relevant, you can\’t entice people to read it. Taking Twitter as an example, here you can entice people to read what you are publishing (or promote the products and services that you are offering) by engaging with them in conversation.

The “trick” if I can call it that is very similar to face to face business networking in that the immediate hard sell is not the way to go about it. You need to do work to find people who share or are discussing your common area or interest and then join in the discussion, once you have had a number of discussions you will start to gain credibility and your Twitter contacts will naturally start to talk about you and include you in other conversations. It\’s at this point that you are most likely to find business or business to find you.

But how long does it take to get to this point?

Here\’s the key, it takes time. I spend most of my social networking time on Twitter so is it any wonder that Twitter is delivering and Facebook and LinkedIn are not? Does it follow that if I were to spend more time on Facebook that I would get more business? Or is it the case that my Facebook activities demonstrate that I am wasting my time?

This is an area that I still need to investigate but there\’s one thing stopping me and here\’s my ultimate point – in order to complete my investigation and prove the point one way or the other I\’ve got to invest an awful lot of time. Time that I don\’t have. Going back to the my inbound traffic statistics there\’s still more traffic coming to my sites from my blogs than Twitter or Facebook so for the amount of time and effort that I put into social networking, the returns are diminishing.

So should I continue to social network? Can I afford not to? There\’s so many people out there telling us that social networking is the future that I really have to continue but how can you do it without it being a supreme drain on time?

The only way is to automate. Use software to link all my Facebook posts, Tweets, blog posts together so that I get the best bang for my buck but isn\’t this defeating the object because now I\’m taking away the human element?

Author Bio: Paul Yates offers free Twitter marketing advice. He has researched many Twitter tools to find Twitter friend adder and automation software that works and found only one that works satisfactorily.

Category: Business
Keywords: social networking,business social networking,social business networking,automate social networking,