Facebook is intended primarily for people who already know each other in real life. Of course the site encourages people to make new friends, but it prefers them to do this via the networks they're already connected to. So, if you send out lots of friend requests in a short period of time, and to people you have no shared connections with already, you might have a temporary block placed on your account.

Facebook's structural problem

Now if you want to use Facebook to connect with new people all over the world on the basis of a shared interest, obviously this aspect is a bit of an obstacle. If your current Facebook friends don't share your interests -- and often they don't, since they're usually relatives, work colleagues and old school mates -- how are you going to friend new people who do?

Numerous groups for every interest

That's where Facebook groups come in. There are numerous active ones on just about any subject you can name. If you join many of them and interact with lots of different people, you're sure to find some you feel a sense of rapport with. Then after a little while you can send them a friend request.

They are much more likely to accept than if they had no idea who you were. By doing this you won't risk getting your account blocked. But it's still a good idea to only send these requests out occasionally. (You can also use this approach with Linkedin. The groups there are an excellent way to get on the radar of lots of new people then make connections with them afterwards.)

Create and use lists

As you build your network of friends on Facebook you can create lists for different interests. So if you have a blog post about blogging, for instance, you can share it with that list only. You're sure to get a good proportion of your network clicking on it.

If you have a Facebook page for an interest that you want to start promoting, you can send those friends who share it a request to like it. Again, since you've preselected them on the basis of their interest, and also got to know them a little, they are much more likely to agree to the request.

This method can be useful, particularly if you've only just started a new Facebook page. After all, it can be hard going getting those likes at the beginning, particularly if it's in a saturated niche.

If you're a blogger who wants to be read by as many people as possible writing your posts is just the start. You also have to share them on social media. And it's not as simple as just dropping links on these sites. You need to create and nurture relationships with other bloggers in your various networks as well. Otherwise you won't get the full benefit.

Businesses are time poor

While these activities are enjoyable, they all take time. Considering how busy most of us are already this is clearly an issue for many people -- particularly those in business. I can certainly see why many of them outsource all their social media work, and why this is a great opportunity for freelancers.

Efficiency inevitably improves

That said, the more you do something the more efficient you become at it. So you can cram lots of social media interaction into a few minutes that might have taken you half an hour when you were starting out. And if you blog consistently then you can really crank out the posts.

Early phases most time consuming

Also, you tend to have to take most time in the early phases of social media use. That's because you're learning how the sites work as well as creating your profiles, etc. With a Facebook page, for example, you have to build it, then get a decent number of likes and some interaction happening. That will take a while to do, but after it's done you don't need to spend so many hours maintaining it. It's like a garden that you only have to water occasionally.

This is particularly true of Twitter. It took me a long while to get a couple of thousand followers to one of my profiles. But now, when I tweet something on that account I tend to get retweets and mentions, which helps draw in still more followers. When I use it to tweet blog posts I get at least five or six clicks on them, often more. Now that doesn't seem like much, but over a year that's thousands of extra views on my blog.

Think long term

So, it's best to look at this whole thing as a long term strategy. You certainly have to invest a lot of time in social media, particularly in the early stages. And you do have to maintain your involvement. But once you've established your presence and built solid followings, the benefits keep on coming with less effort required.

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I have built a Facebook page for this site as well as for my one about SEO. I've discovered that one of the best methods of promoting these is to interact with other Facebook pages, so I've been furiously searching for as many pages related to these two niches as possible.

Anyone with a website is mad if they don't have a Facebook page these days. And social media and SEO are closely related, of course. So you'd expect there to be about the same number of them in each field. But this doesn't seem to be the case.

Many FB pages about social media

What I noticed was that pages about social media were far more numerous than ones related to SEO. Sure, it stands to reason that Facebook, being a social site itself, is more likely to have such pages. Still, I don't think this could fully explain the imbalance in the relative numbers of such sites since it was quite marked.

Also, many of the businesses that offered SEO services included social media packages -- and vice versa. Clearly the two fields are seen as mutually inclusive. That's to be expected, what with all this talk about "social media being the new SEO".

But from what I've seen on Facebook it doesn't seem like both fields are equally important in this process. It seems that, in market terms at least, social is slowly devouring search. There are just so many sites offering promotion and expertise related to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the like. They wouldn't exist if there wasn't a huge demand for them.

Social becoming the main traffic method for business?

From this phenomenon it seems that social is already being seen as the major way to bring visitors to sites, with SEO coming in second. And if we're not at this point already we are certainly very close to it.

Much of this trend is due to the current buzz around social media. But I think it's also got a lot to do with the fact that Google is becoming a lot more sophisticated in its algorithms, making SEO a much more challenging field to succeed in. Now that it's more difficult to gain traffic this way, perhaps an increasing number of SEM companies are going out of business, and fewer than before are starting up in the first place?

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