Should Your Blogs Be Connected to Social Networking?

Over the past couple of years social networking has become the norm.  The question remains is "should you connect your blog to your social networking?"  The answer to this is a surprising "yes, no, I don't know".  Why?  In my opinion a lot of the social networks fill certain niches that may or may not be helpful in blog promotion.  Here is how I see things:

• Digg, Stumbleupon, and etc. - These social networks really are about getting the word out to members of that community about your blog posts so in this case yes you should use them for your blogs.  It is helpful to have a button on your blog to make this easy for readers who may be members of one or more of these social networks.  One well placed stumble or digg could easily see your blog getting traffic well over 1,000 visitors a day.  
• Twitter - Twitter is a more personalized but real time social networking.   Friends on Twitter tend to be other bloggers and those acquaintences you have dealt with at arm's length.  It is true that good relationships can develop using Twitter as well.  Your blog should be set up to automatically deliver the newest post via twitterfeed.com using your RSS feed.  In addition to your feed, you can make reference to your blog even tweeting about certain archived posts but it is very, very important that you do a fair amount of tweeting and retweeting in between so you are not seen as a spammer but you can use it fairly agressively to promote your blog.  Last year I did a Twitter experiment.  Active participation gained me about 4 readers daily on one of my blogs.  I really think that participation will gain you acquaintences and if they like what you are saying they will visit your blog.
• Facebook - Facebook is considerably more personalized than Twitter.  In general friends tend to be family and friends you have a close and personal relationship with.  In this case most of them likely know you blog so you really don't need to promote your own blog there.  From time to time someone may discover your blog and share it with their friends on Facebook but that's just a nice bonus.  At the same time though some blogs have their own personal Facebook pages set up simply for promotion.  The bottom line is do minimal blog promotion on your personal Facebook account.  If you want to promote your blog on Facebook set up a separate account.

Garden Gnome