In our most recent survey, one of the major needs expressed by respondents was a need for ways to social network more effectively. As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite social networking site is Facebook, because of its ability to interface with all so many of the other sites, and because I believe it is an example of the future of social networking.

Facebook is useful for many aspects of social networking, but the one we’re going to discuss today is promoting your own blog. Before I get started listing the blog promotion opportunities, I cannot stress enough the importance of not overusing any of these strategies - and the importance of not using Facebook only for promoting a blog. Try that, and you’ll lose friends faster than you can add them. The purpose of Facebook is to foster genuine networking relationships - and no one like to be “spammed.” But along with superpoking, sharing videos, writing on friends walls, and responding to clever status messages, here are some great blog-promotion opportunites with Facebook:

1. Sign up for FriendFeed, and add the FriendFeed Facebook Application, and selectively submit your blog posts to the Feed.
2. If you’re on Twitter, you can automate the above submissions by adding TwitterFeed, and then adding your Twitter stream to your FriendFeed.
3. Join Groups that relate to the content of your blog, or start a group on the topic of your blog. As a group administrator, you can message the members of the group when you have an action item that your think they’ll all be interested in (heed word of caution above about overusing these techniques).
4. Put links to your really important stuff in your “status” message (occassionally). Note, there are several Twitter apps on Facebook that automatically update your Twitter status to your Facebook status - if you’ve installed the TwitterFeed app in #2 above, I would not recommend using these apps. Your Facebook Friends might grow weary of the constant blog promotion directly on Facebook.)

Also see:

• Patrick Ruffini: The Early Adopter Effect
• Facebook info on the WebWarriors Wiki
• How to Develop a Social Networking Profile in Four Easy Steps
• Friendfeed: Web 2.0 for Fans of Discussion Forums