Beware of Investing too much in Social Networking

Social networking is all the rage nowadays on the web. The advent of "web 2.0" embraced interaction between surfers and websites. But is all that time and energy being put to good use? Today there are more social networking sites than ever. Every conceivable niche has a site for it. There are the biggies of course, Digg, Reddit, etc and then there are some up and comers targeting niches like Active Rain and Ziki. All of these sites are consumer driven, i.e. they wouldn't have any content if it weren't for their users. Quite a few of these sites have been bought by search engine giants like Google and Yahoo. (Yahoo recently acquired Mybloglog and Upcoming.) Many of these sites were started with altruistic goals in mind. So it begs the question, how much time and energy should you invest in these sites when they could be bought tomorrow and the terms of service changed? Take Active Rain for example. A great social networking site for real estate professionals that gives you a free content page and blog. Blogging is encouraged as is linking to the site. There are several members with hundreds of pages (myself included) of content created by them, posted on the site. Should the site be sold tomorrow and the rules changed.....what then? Just some food for thought. When creating content for a site out of your control, you are taking a risk. On the flip side, adding hundreds of pages of original content to your own site is always a good thing. You'll never have to worry whether its still yours tomorrow. While I'm still very active on several social networking sites (and have no intention of stopping), I'm now saving the best stuff for my own social network...my own site and its visitors. About the author: Charles Richey is the webmaster for lvrealty.net, a Las Vegas real estate website and authors a Las Vegas real estate blog.