In the last three years, social networking has blown up. Social networking has taken on many forms over the last few years. What it is, is any site that allows you to communicate and share comments, stories, pictures, music, basically anything, with other individuals you may or may not know. Friendster was the “original gangster” on the networking scene, but has been abandoned in droves for sites like MySpace and Facebook.
I myself, am a zombie to the world of Social Networking. I can’t go more than a couple of hours without checking at least one of my networking sites. I’m no sorority girl, but I like to keep the world up to date on what I’m doing (cause I know everyone cares so much).
I have the practical uses like everyone else, then I also have the business uses. I’ve found ways to use all the below social networks to greatly increase my blog views and I’ll tell you how.
MySpace 
MySpace was my first step into social networking. I found a link in someones AIM profile, and then realized I had a ton of friends who were also friends with them. I immediately signed up and began adding friends like crazy. I added so many people so fast, my account was suspended because they thought I was a spammer.
MySpace was cool because it seemed like everyone was on it. You could search by school, graduation year, zip code, name, e-mail, anything. It was also a step above the rest because it gave you the option to customize your profile. This was especially cool for someone like myself who has a pretty good grip on HTML and CSS.
If you ask me, the customizable profiles is what’s killing MySpace. I don’t know the exact numbers, and I’m sitting at work so I’m not about to go digging for them, but over the last six months, MySpace’s user activity has plummeted. I like to blame this on a couple things.
For one, as I already said, the customized profiles. So many profiles are next to impossible to load, they crash your browser, have embedded viruses, account phishing, and so much more. It’s a pain in the ass just to go to a friends account to leave them a comment.
The second reason, just 2 years ago Rubert Murdoch and Fox bought a majority percentage of MySpace for over $200 million. This sounds all great and dandy, but really this meant a major corporation was now running the show. Of course they kept the face of MySpace “Tom” on payroll, but what we soon had were site wide “make-overs”, big dollar advertising campaigns, some of the most irritating flash advertisements I have ever seen, and even more spam.
Now, MySpace is suffering the same fate as Friendster did. It’s dying a slow and terrible death. Dedicated users are now leaving for the likes of Facebook, and other similar friend finding networks.
MySpace is dying, but I continue to use it to post bulletins linking to each and every blog post I make. I’ve reached a few dedicated viewers through MySpace, mainly my close friends, but it’s still a great place to let everyone know you have a new blog up. No matter how good of friends you have, they will still check their MySpace more than your blog.
My MySpace pages:
Facebook 
Just a couple months ago, Facebook surpassed MySpace in user activity. Up until about a year ago, in order to use Facebook, you needed a college e-mail address. Before that, you needed an e-mail address from a supported college. This made the user base of Facebook much smaller, but much more dedicated. Facebook people didn’t have MySpace, and MySpace users shunned Facebook.
Once Facebook lifted their user restraints, user activity skyrocketed. Now all of a sudden, people could try it out, stay if they liked it, or move back to MySpace. People like myself enjoyed the spam free, faster loading Facebook. Quickly MySpace took a backseat to my Facebook usage.
On Facebook, you had a greater feeling of knowing the people you were “friends” with. MySpace users tend to add every person, band, group, merchant, artist, and porn star. Facebook users are much more selective about who they add. You can’t even view a “non-friends” profile unless you’re in the same network.
Another great feature is the profiles. Everyone has the same basic profile (aside from “applications”). You fill in a few basic questions, just enough to tell the world about yourself, and your done! They all load extremely fast, and you won’t be bombarded with glittery blinking Gifs.
I pretty much stick to Facebook for my real-world-contacts-type networking site. It’s a great place to quickly and efficiently communicate with your friends.
From a business stand point, the “Posted Items” sections is a god send. I don’t use it too often, partly because I like to keep my Facebook less business oriented, but when I do, I see a definite spike in Facebook referalls. I’ll use it less frequently, but combine multiple blog links into one post.
StumbleUpon 
StumbleUpon is the single greatest time waster I have ever seen. It’s a very simple concept that couldn’t be executed any better. You download a small unobtrusive bar to your web browser (it can be hidden at anytime), then you register with StumbleUpon. At the time of registration, you fill in some of your favorite topics; gaming, movies, TV, music, magazines, religion, hunting, midgets - whatever you’re into.
Once you have your favorite topics selected, you simply click the small StumbleUpon icon on your new menu bar, and it brings you to a random web site with “tags”, which closely match your selected favorites. If you like the site, give it a thumbs up, if you don’t, a thumbs down. Each time you rank a site, it adjusts your favorites, and even develops a list of things of you don’t like. The more you use it, the more accurate it gets at predicting what you will like.
Web sites can be submitted to StumbleUpon by any user, at anytime. With over 6 million users, you will never run out of random web sites to stumble (pun intended) around on. This is especially useful for people (like myself) looking to drive traffic to their own sites.
I’ve had great success using StumbleUpon to drive visits to this very site. For example, in just over 2 months of running this blog, I’ve received over 7,000 unique visitors solely from StumbleUpon. Granted a lot of these visitors spend as little as 10 seconds on the page, every now and then I will grab a few subscribers, slowly but surely developing my reader base.
Digg 
Digg is very similar to StumbleUpon, in the sense that it involves user submitted items. It’s different in the way it delivers them. While StumbleUpon is random in what you see, Digg lets you see a list of headlines and excerpts from each submission in a given topic, and then let’s you choose what you want to read.
If you enjoy what you’ve just seen/read, you can “Digg” it, which goes towards that news items rank. The more Diggs an item receives, the higher it will get listed. If a site hits the front page? You’re looking at 100,000 views in the matter of a couple hours.
It’s near impossible for someone like myself to hit the front page, but even ranking on the “Upcoming” or “New” pages will drive you some added traffic. While StumbleUpon has sent over 7,000 visits in the last 2 months, Digg has sent a much weaker 1,500. While the sheer number of visits is very different, the hidden benefit to being a Digg user is, on average, they spend up to a minute longer on the site. They also have a much lower bounce rate, meaning they read more than just the item they came for.
It takes less then a minute to submit a site to Digg. For the minimal amount of time invested, it’s an extremely useful investment that will result in quite a few more visitors.
Twitter 
Twitter is one of my favorite new online time wasters. I’ve already blogged about how awesome it is in, “Why Twitter Will Rule The World“. It features the newest web trend in “Micro-blogging”. Micro-blogging is basically the same idea as Facebook and MySpace’s “Status Updates”, except, that’s all Twitter does. That might not sound real exciting but let me tell you why it is.
On MySpace you have 500 friends, Facebook you have 150, on Twitter, if you’re lucky, you’ll have 50. Your friends update their status, and it posts on your “Feed”. The really cool part is, you can update your status via your cellphone, and even subscribe to individual friends, and receive text message updates when your friends update their own status.
My personal use of it is even cooler. I use it connect quite a few networks. Let me give you a rundown of my chain of command…
I send a status update from my cellphone to 40404 (Twitter) > My Twitter Updates > My status is posted on my friends feeds > My status is sent to the cellphones of my subscribers > My Facebook status changes to match my Twitter update > and lastly, my blog updates the “What I’m Doing…” box on my sidebar.
It’s all really cool, especially if you run a blog. It adds a much more personal feel, especially to the readers who don’t personally know you.
Flickr 
Flickr is pretty straight forward. It’s much like ImageShack, and PhotoBucket, except a little more hip and trendy. You can upload your photos directly from your computer, for free hosting on the Flickr servers. Then, you can share your photos with your friends, post them on other sites, or even have cool “photostreams” like I have on my sidebar.
Again, this is a lot cooler if you run a blog. You can find image hosting everywhere, but it’s hard to find the personal feel and interactivity Flickr offers your readers. I’m still relatively new to Flickr, I’ve always heard about it, but I just finally adopted it.
What makes it really cool, you can caption, arrange, tag, and build photo sets while offline. Then upload right from a desktop application. The one reason I’ve avoided online photo hosting sites is the clunky interface and upload options. Flickr solves all those problems.
I suggest everyone with a bunch of pictures, upload atleast a few just to test it out. I guarantee you will find it very useful and you’ll find yourself uploading more and more.
Summary
So, as you see, I’m a bit of a freak with the social networking stuff. This is just a break down of my most frequently used networks, in reality, I also use Reddit, Slashdot, Mixx, Del.icio.us, Technorati, and a few others.
While this might seem a little “excessive”, I use them not from a standpoint of having all the time in the world and nothing to do, but more from the point of view of driving traffic to my sites. Through the use of social networks, in 63 days, I’ve been able to drive almost 12,000 unique views from all around the world directly to this little blog. That’s pretty cool.
Tags: Networking, Stats, Technology, Web
