It goes without saying that you should be polite when using social media. There are a whole lot of good reasons for this.

For example, if you make a habit of being rude and obnoxious on sites like Facebook and Twitter it could effect your personal life, or even your career. Everything you post on such sites is findable now.

But being well mannered is also good for business. You just get more followers, fans, likes and retweets, etc if you are polite and helpful. And if you're widely perceived as being approachable as well as knowledgeable, there's a much greater likelihood that you'll receive interview requests and guest posting offers.

Here's just one little example of how being polite has helped me: Recently I posted a question on Linkedin Answers. I got several responses. You can rate the answers as "good" and "best", which I did. So I assume those people were notified.

But there were others I hadn't acknowledged. I hadn't used this facility before and thought there might be some sort of automatic thank button, like on Quora. But there wasn't. So I sent e-mails to all those who'd answered my question, thanking them for their valuable input.

Pretty soon after that one of these people, who's very well established and has a big network, sent me a connection request, which I immedaitely accepted. One of the other users who answered -- again with a big network -- e-mailed me to say he was happy to offer his advice, and not to hesitate to contact him for any other questions. So, a conversation has started there.

Such developments are hardly remarkable, of course. But I wouldn't have made those connections had I not made a point of saying thanks. Clearly, being polite on social media can result in immediate benefits.

It's well established that one of the best ways to get your blog known is through commenting on other blogs. (Needless to say you shouldn't be spamming them but making thoughtful contributions that continue the conversation.)

While many blogs have a basic form in which to submit your details, including your URL, more and more of them have third party blog commenting software installed. One of the best known of these systems is Disqus.

This is a good platform in a lot of ways. So you should sign up to it.

Apart from anything else it speeds up the process of commenting because you don't have to keep manually inserting your details for every new blog. You just log in and it will include the URL you've got in your profile.

Not only can it be found on a lot of blogs, but quite a few big news and magazine sites use it as well, for example The Telegraph and Rolling Stone.

Some sites like these these get absolutely huge traffic. So if you post a really good comment -- particularly if it's soon after an article is published -- you may well get a torrent of readers clicking through to your blog.

Then there's the fact that you're considerably raising the odds of having your blog seen by both mainstream journalists and editors. Get enough of them to be aware of it and you never know, you might get mentioned in the body of a subsequent post. If you get enough of this kind of exposure and take advantage of it you might even end up writing for the publication at some stage.