I was just listening to a podcast from Small Biz Tech Girl where they were discussing the importance of social networking using such sites as Facebook, MySpace, Linked and numerous others to drive up business for your product. They also touched on the potential waste of time these sites can be if you get sucked in. I use Facebook, MySpace, Okinawa Hai! Society and my latest discovery, Blissfully Domestic Living Community to help drive readers to my blog. I use the e-mail system on Facebook to e-mail all of my ‘friends’ and the Bulletin option on MySpace in the same way. Okinawa Hai! Society and Blissfully Domestic Living Community allow me to create an event advertising my giveaways and even creating a start and end time for the event. Add all the e-mails I send to my huge contact list in my personal e-mail account and I have got some big numbers on giveaway opening days.
If you have a blog and want to drive traffic to it do you use social networking sites to help like I do? Where do most of your readers find out about your blog in the first place? Do you think that social networking is a good thing or a waste of time?
Planet Books 
I use an application/website that automatically sends out the links to my most recent posts as a “tweet” on Twitter, and the posts and tweets I share via FriendFeed get updated to Facebook though another app. Twitter has actually been a pretty good blog-traffic driver for me.
I use facebook and myspace but not really to drive traffic to my blog. I just use them to chat with and catch up with my friends. I’m sort of interested in Twitter, not sure I could update it enough to make it fun though.
I use commenting on blogs I read and guest blogging or belonging to a collaborative site I contribute to for potential blog traffic. i also try to trade links with bloggers I like.
I have facebook but I just have my daughter as a friend and that’s it.
I don’t have a Facebook, or MySpace page, and I have no idea what Twitter is. I’ve been asked to join Facebook a number of times, but I don’t have time to create a page, never mind keep it updated! I do belong to the Book Blogs community, though. But between responding to my emails and blog comments and keeping my blog updated and reading the blogs in Google reader, I barely have time for anything else!
This is a very good blog site. I have been back repeatedly within the last few days and want to register for your feed by using Google but find it difficult to work out the right way to do it exactly. Do you know of any tutorials?