An important tool for any designer looking to get started building a following and establishing their presence in the vast sea of cyberspace, is Social Media Networking. It’s role can no longer be denied as the invaluable asset that it has become for the unestablished and established blogger alike. So many ways to connect and share with the websidents that previously may not have had such a direct line to finding your world wide whereabouts. And so many networks are springing up to help bring more connectivity into the community, that it’s becoming easier for bloggers to find an audience, though as with anything, moderation is key.

Two obstacles are looming on this frontier as the proliferation of social media networks begins, or at least as seen by the Arbenting duo. The first is standard with the introduction of any new element into your daily routine, and that is the allocating of time to allow for proper SMN’ing. If you think that you can just sign up on these networks, and everything will happen for you, then you are ignoring the key part of the word. They don’t call it net’WORK’ing because you can slack your way through it. You need to dedicate time to connecting with your fellow SMN’ers to effectively make use of this tool. It’s a very reciprocal community and needs to be given your focus to insure that you see the full benefits these networks can offer.

Cartoon by Guhmshoo

Another issue that can potentially come to fruition through the growing number of social media networks, is getting lost among the masses, and being unable to connect with the audience you sought out in the first place. We could potentially end up where we started, with a slightly smaller pool to be swimming in, keeping us from finding our way through networks to touch base with the community. As the network expands, it becomes evermore important to be able to keep track of all your contacts with ease to help maximize your time to it’s potential, as we mentioned earlier. And showing how responsive the community is to it’s ever-changing, overall needs, solutions have begun to come forward to make this more accessible.

In fact, we at Arbenting, as we mentioned with the launch of our Social Media Icon Set, we have a directory for designers coming out towards this end as well. It should be ready for it’s initial launch by November 1st (if not a little sooner). We are very excited about this, and hope it will help fill a need as we believe it will.

As more and more designers strike out to establish themselves in this enterprising and eclectic field, the importance of the Social Media Networks becomes clearer than ever, and it’s role proves more pivotal than perhaps was at first recognized. These community driven nexus have been embraced en mass, as aides crop up across the blogosphere to keep you dialed into the signal. From numerous WordPress plugins, to Adobe Air applications all designed to keep this creative community circuitry flawlessly flowing, and capturing the networks full capacity for it’s many users. This social media market seems to have made it’s mark and it will be sticking around for a while. Time to make this tool work for you and your blog.