That's a tough one. I've cut back to almost 0 time now. The only one I'm doing is Twitter and I've only recently started being a twit. Never got much traffic from any of the other social networks, but maybe I didn't have enough time or didn't try hard enough.
I did a review of one of my blogs on StumbleUpon recently and got a big surge of traffic - that didn't last. It was kind of interesting though. I find StumbleUpon too big to be that interesting to me.
I just got a big blast of Stumble traffic today from my blog post about Amazon suing the state of New York due to affiliate-driven sales tax. I've bought Stumble traffic too. Bad thing is people only stay on your page for a second and leave - never do anything else for the most part.
Hey the main social sites I focus on are stumbleupon, Digg, and most recently Twitter. They have all provided a decent amount of traffic, but nothing too extraordinary. The good thing about StumbleUpon and Digg is that you don't have to spend too much time on them themselves other than submitting your Diggs and Stumbles.
As per time spent, I have been spending the most time on twitter now, just to provide updates. But overall I would say about an hour and a bit a day would be sufficient. Just do your best to build some quality relationships with others and you should be good.
I would guess around 6 hours of my day are spent on social networking. I have recently seen an increased amount of traffic from Twitter. It is nice to see my updates on Twitter start to pay off!
Time spending in social networking is completely depends upon your interest, the more you spend in social networking, the more friends you'll get and obviously you'll get more results. But it's better if you concentrate on main social networking sites which is popular now a days and have regular updations in that community.
But it depends on which site. almost 30% on stumbleupon, 10%digg , Facebook
20%. All other sites I don't visit every day. Tell you digg is better, but at stuble people are more friendly, and they socialize.
I spend several hours a day social networking. I especially like Facebook Groups. By joining you can post your link. I think social netwoking is so important these days, as netwoking and relationships is what it's all about.
Everyone of them is time in time out. I use Plaxo LinkedIn and Twitter to build traffic to my blog. Every targeted questions series or update or post gets me some readers (From 5-150) and more importantly a couple subscribers. Like evereything else it involves work and constant use of the medium. That means being social and communicating with your audience.
The amount of time I spend on 2.0 is directly related to what I am marketing. Some get zero and some get an abundance of time.
Some things work well on 2.0 and others with search. Just a matter of matching what you are marketing to the right medium.
If I were to market a travel site, I would use 2.0 and search, news/politics would be strictly 2.0. But the local plumbing site would be strictly search, because I am sure the traffic on 2.0 sites would not amount to much within that subject.
Just a matter of targeting your subject and then matching it to the right demographic.
One way to think about social networking is to avoid thinking of it as some way to trick or game traffic to your site.
Conversion into affiliate sales totally depends on how well the traffic is suited to your site profile or your offers.
If you get 100,000 high school kids to your payday loans site, you're very likely to end up with 0 conversions.
If you got the same traffic to an xbox360 or iphone fan site, you'd do very much better.
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The hallmark of successful social networking has to do with understanding the core audience/customer for your product and going out to the relevant social networks to find them.
BTW, although there're new-fangled networks like digg, plurk, twitter, friendfeed, etc, I find that old "social network 1.0" sites like forums, yahoo groups, google groups, newsgroups and blogs work just as powerfully.
For example, a large part of my success has been my success in blogging. Not just from generating affiliate sales, but also establishing partnerships with other marketers in the field, becoming a trust advisor to affiliate networks (the super affiliates payouts don't hurt too...!), and being brought in to look at and test products and services before they're launched to the mass market.
The bottomline with social networks/social bookmarking: It's really not about how new or shiny the tool is...It's how you use the tool.
That's a very good point, Andre. We only use 2.0 sites and a just only blogging and forums. Recently all the 2.0 media got very popular and people talk about them a lot. As I said I spend a lot of time there and discover ways to succeed. Networking and building relationship is a huge matter. We need to get to examine 1.0 potential too.
I only use social network marketing when I add a new post to my blog, then I just add it to everysite I use. No need to spend priceless time to optimize..
I sat in Gary Vaynerchuck's keynote at BlogWorld this past weekend and he recommended spending 2-3 hours a day leaving comments (non-spam) on other blogs.
Whoa, 2 - 3 hours a day? When do you get everything else done???
Well actually if I didn't spend so much time posting in the forum I
maybe could, so I guess it just depends on you business and strategy
and how many hats you have to wear.
I imagine if you were a full-time blogger and that's all you did,
then it would make sense because your main job would be
to try to drive traffic to your blog.
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