With the proliferation of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter you can spend your entire day staying connected to the detriment of your real life.

How much is enough and when do you cross the line from enough to too much?  I have spent a lot of time considering this recently as more and more people that I talk with are having trouble understanding what the true benefits of online social networking are and as they weigh those benefits against the costs.

What are the costs? The main cost is time, and as anyone over the age of 40 knows, time is valuable. In fact, the older you get the more valuable time becomes… but we will not digress into that discussion.

Lets take a quick overview of the origins and growth of Online Social Networks. Social networking began to evolve as early as 1999 with Epinions.com. By 2003 you had the arrival of Friendster, MySpace and Bebo. Myspace was arguably the first hugely successful Social Network becoming the dominant online social network community until the arrival of Facebook. In 2004 Facebook opened up to the non-College Student community and began to grown rapidly. By 2008 Facebook had eclipsed MySpace with well over 200 million users globally. In 2005 Twitter was formed and by mid 2008 had become a popular phenomena and as of 2009 has become the most talked about new Internet application. Current growth rates for Twitter have eclipsed all prior social networks and it seems likely to continue.

Now here is the problem. With the plethora of social networks, each of which has a slightly different focus, you can easily find that you spend all of your time updating your networks and staying connected to the people you have in your various connection groups. You can easily find that the time required will out-strip your available discretionary time and start eating into time that you have allocated for other tasks such as work, play, or family time.

I will use Twitter as an example of how I draw the line. Twitter is a sort of instant messaging bulletin board system. It allows you to keep abreast of what others are doing and at the same time let others know what you are doing. The problem arises with the proliferation of network connections and the lack of boundaries. I recently deleted a connection to a marketing professional who was using his Twitter account to let me know, blow by blow, what the cafeteria ladies were doing while he was visiting his son at school (parents day) and having lunch with his son. Now, first of all, he was there to visit with his son and instead he was absorbed with Tweeting about the experience rather than enjoying the experience, and second, why in the world would he think that it was important to let his ‘followers’ know what the cafeteria ladies were doing? He was wasting my time, wasting his time, and most importantly he was wasting his son’s time.

Social Networks can be very addictive. Even mature, well intentioned, and reasonable people can become absorbed with the technology and loose sight of the purpose of the technology.  Forest and Trees problem.

So, how much is enough?

Enough is when you find yourself telling people about inane issues that most would consider a waste of time.  Look, if you want to tell people where you are having dinner tonight that is fine but you are using a social network as a social tool and that is what they are designed for.

If you want to use a social network as a business building tool you have a different sort of etiquette to consider. The first thing to keep in mind in business is that time is valuable. Your time and the time of your audience. If you waste your time that is your choice but if you waste the time of your audience you are running the risk of loosing your audience and that is a very poor choice for any business person.

Use Social Networking Tools in a business environment to spread information that is pertinent to the business purpose of the relationship. If you have a clothing store share information about new items and sales and trends, etc. If you have a financial services business share information about the latest developments in the industry, rates, and returns and risks, etc. If you have a service business tell people about the new developments in your business, new services, and new tools that you have to offer to your clients.

People subscribe to Social Networks for a reason. Many of the people that subscribe do so because they do not know what else to do and they think that the more people that they are subscribed to the more that will subscribe to them and therefore they have a large network and that is somehow a good thing. If you are in business you know that the key is not how many people visit but how many visitors buy something that is the key to success.  It is Conversions not Clicks. It is buyers not visitors to your store. Sure, the more visitors that you have the more likely it will be that someone will purchase but tricking people into visiting just so that you have a large flow of visitors is not the real goal.

The real goal is to increase the quantity of high quality traffic, not just the quantity of traffic in general. You increase the quantity of high quality traffic by having high quality products, services, and information for people to view. Posting messages about your dining plans and experiences, unless you are a restaurant critic, simply wastes the time of the people who would visit your business.

Keep your messages on point and pertinent and your audience will appreciate your message more and they will be more likely to share your messages with others who are interested in the same subjects.

Less can be more, and it can also be enough.

The NetOffer miniBLOG System is a Social Network designed specifically for Businesses to use as a marketing tool. The miniBLOG System is built on a combination of an Online Directory System + a Classified Advertising System + the Wordpress BLOG System all integrated with a miniBLOG that is similar to Twitter, but more feature rich.  The NetOffer miniBLOG System is a powerful tool for marketing your business.