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Some people think Facebook, is a waste of time.

And it can be - IF you’re prone to time wasting. You don’t have to be if you learn how to use it properly.

There are plenty of less vocal people who believe StumbleUpon is for amateur sharers. And of course there is the big camp of people who think all social media, including blogging and social bookmarking, is a huge waste of your resources that you won’t get anything back from.

What’s so often missed here is that, under different circumstances, the view of tools as useful and/or useless are right. A powerful weapon in the hands of a novice is impotent.

And yes, I mean that the dirty way.

Seriously though, it’s always your choice whether to be a novice or to learn more. It’s much more savvy to say you don’t know how to use Facebook for business, and then find out, than it is to claim it’s a time waster when you’re playing the Zombie game and bothering your co-workers.

The easiest way to overcome the potential lazy factor in any social media tool is to limit the amount of time you spend on it.

If you have 15 minutes to get everything you need during a trip to the grocery store, the way you spend your time differs greatly. You’ll bring a list, think ahead to how to most efficiently cruise the aisles, etc.

On the other hand, if you are taking a leisurely trip that’s not needed, you tend to browse and look at things you normally wouldn’t buy, not to mention spend too much.

Plan your trips to social media sites the same way. You can always come back to play Scrabulous or chat with friends, after you’ve finished your work .

I liken the use of Social Media to the use of the telephone. (Yes, the internet too, but that’s so obvious that the point is still missed. But heck, if you were smart enough to catch that, I guess you can skip to the end.)

You can use the telephone for dating (phone chat rooms), to waste time (gossiping with a friend), to solidify a relationship (calling a friend just to say hello), to touch base (let your mother know you’re alive), and yes, for business too (call instead of driving over and having a meeting, connect with a client, check up on a vendor, ask a colleague a question, network, etc.).

It’s up to you how you want to use Facebook, or del.icio.us, or MySpace or Furl or any Social Media tool.

If other people think it’s a waste of your time, let them.

They aren’t the ones who have to live with your profits and losses at the end of the quarter. There’s plenty of information about how to use Social Media for business, Facebook in particular. A lot of it is free.

If that’s what you’re interested in doing, don’t let the “time waster” scare throw you off - go out there and find out for your self what the best tips are and test them.

Believe your own results.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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If you submit all the links you find, every day, to all the social news, bookmarking and sharing sites you know of, you will get into an endless loop of site sharing. This is far from what you want to accomplish.

Instead, see how much sharing you usually get done in whatever time you have set aside for share work, whether it’s 15 minutes a day, or 2 hours at the end of the week. Make that number the amount of sites you gather.

You don’t have to hold yourself to exactly 100 sites. About 90 or 110 will do - this way if you find a really good site when you’re near your soft limit, you won’t waste time agonizing over what site not to share.

After a few weeks, you’ll get a feel for how many sites you normally come across and what percentage of them can make it to the sharing stage. Don’t just set a limit to the sites you bookmark. Think about keeping your submissions to some approximate limit. You can always come back during non-marketing time to add more.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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As you finish with basic sharing of sites, you’ll likely want to move on to the subset of those sites that you want to vote for, or submit to a social news site.

What you’ll run into at some point is that as you’re submitting stories, many of the links you’ve submitted are already present. The way you’ll find this out is as you’re submitting- this can quickly turn into a waste of time. Or, if you’re often the first submitter, by the time you’re visiting other submissions and voting, there’s a pile of new sites to see and vote on.

You can overcome this by setting aside time to look on the popular and upcoming page for stories you’ve already read at other sites and voting for them, when you first log onto the site, before your submissions.

Then, when you’re adding your sites, you’ll have an idea which ones to skip. Of course, if you want to be the first to submit a great story, this can get in the way. But you’ll build a better following by keeping most of your submissions to completely new discoveries rather than brand new submissions from sites everyone already knows about..

When you’re finished voting for sites you already know about, you can then scan the upcoming and popular lists for your favorite category, and vote for the links you didn’t know about. If time pressed, instead of starting the cycle all over again, you can either end on this round of submissions. Or, if the submissions aren’t time sensitive, simply add the links that you enjoy, but aren’t as popular, to your share list for the next day or visit.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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Depending on what industry you’re in, or what country you’re from, you will find that a particular time of day drives more attention to the links that you have submitted to your favorite bookmarking site. There are also dead spots in the day, or certain days of the week where it’s harder to get noticed.

Experiment with the time of day that you share and take note of the effect. Extend that to the day of the week, or even the seasons.

Since the links you are submitting will be for other people, you can’t tell from the server logs which link is getting the most traffic, because of course, you can’t access that information. What you can do is look at other signs that might give you a clue that the site is busy at the time you’re online.

Here are some indicators that may help:

• Look to see if there’s any indication of how many people are online. This may be reflected by an increase in comments being made, or you may see an indicator next to the names of more of your friends names that show they are online.
• Go to the upcoming page and look at the times that the links are being submitted, or how often links roll of to the next page if there is no time stamp. There may be days when the top post and the last post are 12 hours apart, or don’t roll off the page the whole time you’re visiting the site, whereas on some high traffic sites, within ten minutes the page could be completely different.
• Keep track of the time of day that you visit each site, and vary it from time to time to test for a better “rush hour”. If you submit a link and get votes immediately one day, and on another, you don’t get many, it’s not always the story you’ve submitted.
• Search the blogosphere for posts about the site. For example, there have to be hundreds of posts about how to use StumbleUpon, as well as how to increase your exposure.
• Look on video and tutorial sites for information, too.
• Send a private message to your friends if you can. They may have tips they would be happy to share one on one, but not with the whole world.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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At some point, you’re going to figure out that there’s one place that you’ll want to store every single link you find useful, and another that’s just for promoting your very favorite links of that bunch.

Or you’ll find that the atmosphere at one site is more suited to you than other, though they drive traffic at about the same rate. On some sites you may notice that having lots of friends helps you spread your message - on others, accepting friend requests dilutes the power of your vote.

Notice all the little things. They’ll help you understand the tool you’re using, and also share to the widest possible group.

But don’t just notice them, keep track. Whether you have to make notes for yourself until you remember, or use a tool that annotates sites, make sure you recall what leverage helps at what site.

Experiment now and then. Do sexy headlines work better at one site, where informative titles work on another? Even a slight advantage will sometimes mean the difference between dozens of visitors and hundreds, even thousands.

Notice the details.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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There are bookmarklets, sidebar widgets, FB apps, desktop applications, browser extensions or toolbars, and other tools that will help you spread your sharing task over the day. The one hour or less you take to share links can be integrated as part of your regular surfing, blogging or browsing routine.

It can reduce your time spent on sharing even further, as well as spread the time spent throughout your day. This also ties into social presence marketing by giving your potential and current clients clues that you’re available.

(Somewhat the opposite of out of sight, out of mind, and a lot more true.)

Some tools share your links in more than one place, which expands the audience of the links you are sharing.

Of all the web 2.0 tools that can be used to share links and generate traffic, Facebook is my favorite.

With it, I can immediately double the sharing potential of any Web 2.0 site that has a Facebook application. For example, the StumbleUpon application lets me share a link in StumbleUpon, an action which is updated to the news pushed out to my Facebook connections, along with the link.

It lets people know I use StumbleUpon, and that I’ve discovered a new page to share, with the link, so whether or not they are SU users, they can visit the site I’ve just reviewed. Expansion of my network in both places becomes more organic as a result.

When I share links with my 340 Facebook “friends”, this shows up on many of their home pages, where they can easily share with their FB friends.

If 10 of them share with a direct network of 200, that’s your link on 2,000 profiles, not to mention what can happen if they share with their friends. Doesn’t happen often, but it doesn’t have to for it to be effective, every subscriber to a newsletter doesn’t read each issue either.

Even a 10% conversion rate could result in 100 eventual sales.

The people you share with on say, Furl, and Digg may have some overlap, but not enough that sharing in both places becomes an issue.

To get more exposure, to the sites you share (which can occasionally be from your own site in some cases), you’ll want to find the tools that help you do a better job at sharing.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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