Being actively involved in social networks can be very time consuming and take an extremely long time to nurture and grow. These social networks are just additional avenues for ‘exposure’ … there’s no guarantee that anyone will buy just because we’ve put ourselves out there.. most of the people on twitter are just like us -business owners looking for more exposure to boost their own business (or they’re celebrities who already have a huge fan base). They’re not so much the average every day consumer looking for things to buy.  Linked In is another network that is more for B2B socializing – not so much a way to generate more sales.
 
Facebook has a little bit more potential to target your real consumers; but the site is so unstable 80% of the time (but that’s a whole different complaint I have with them), and the reality is that fb users who are your target market are only on facebook to chit chat and have fun with their friends – again, they’re not looking to buy when they’re having their Facebook experience.

That doesn’t mean we should trash the whole thing – we need to be visible to them – we are like the ‘impulse isle’ in the grocery store – they didn’t go there for you specifically, but maybe.. if they see you, they might have a brain trigger. 
 
I have been on some of these networks researching, testing them out, seeing what would work best for our clients for years – and my conclusion is this: they are relationship builders – they give us a better opportunity to meet new people and establish a bond with them. But with any relationship, it takes a long time to build and actually establish a bond.
 
Now, with regard to time management in order to maintain some sort of consistent presence on these social networks….   I personally don’t have time to post content on a regular basis - but I did take the time out to do some research on a few blogs who DO take time to post good content.  And through a separate online program at http://hootsuite.com I just link up to those blogs (adding their RSS feed) and whenever the blog sends something out, it posts on my business twitter account – half the time I don’t even know something was tweeted via the blog. But it gives me steady consistent ‘exposure’. Granted, it’s not building any kind of relationship with my followers (you actually have to ‘engage’ one on one with them in order to do this).. but they can’t forget about me if I’m showing up in there twitter or fb feed once in a while. 
 
And that brings us to the world of “Blogs” — they are so versatile – you can log into your own blog, post something and walk away.  That post will automatically be sent to all of your social networks if you set it up to do that (and I highly recommend you do) and there is your consistent exposure to all the various networks in one short little step – freeing your time up to do what you need to do to actually run your business!