Social Media and the blog

Here's the thing - How many social sites do I need to sign up to, to help my blog?

Is there an actual number? Like is it 3 or 705?

I enjoy writing the bog. It is a place for my poems, for what is happening with my novels, a place to just post what I am thinking or post things I like. But I need an audience - right?  I am not doing this to avoid taking out the bins (actually that's my son's job) or to avoid cooking or mopping the floors.

I may be avoiding those things but I would avoid them without the blog. I think therefore I blog - or more correctly, I have a computer, with internet access, therefore I blog.

I use the blog to force me to write. Hemingway (at least I think it was him but I'm not about to Google search it, so let's just say it was) made the point that a writer should write every day. He (Hemingway, not the writer because that would be he or she) would go into his little room (I am just saying little it might have been a huge expanse, but poetically, little is more elegant) with his writing on a stand (bit like a music stand for sheet music) and a pencil - always a pencil - and writing until he felt he was right in the mix, ideas, words, the whole thing flying... Then he would put the pencil down and take a break - let his thoughts catch up with his writing.  Just on this - everyday! Even on the day he blew his brains out - did he write with his pencil first on that day?

So the blog helps me write every day but I want an audience as well. I want people to read the stuff I write, to share the things I like, perhaps even - (Oh, let it be) make a comment occasionally.  And that desire brings me back to the original question - how many social sites does one blog need?

I have Facebook, Twitter, Linkdin, Stumbleupon, Digg, Google+, You Tube, just to name a few - (and that begs the question - Has anyone written a social media rap yet?)

All of these sites linked to my blog, and posts flying back and forth like the bats that fly across Ivanhoe (now that the Govt. has shifted them out of the city and relocated down by the local river where the trees are dying thanks to their new role as bedsits for bats). Does anyone really see them or is it just the occasional glane up at the night sky and a faint whisper of the black body as it flaps on by.

Are we bloggers, bats of the night?

Blind as bats.

Echo locating bats - repeating certain words over and over again - a code for "Look at me! Look at me!"

Vampire bats sucking at the blood of social media sites, news sites, clip playing sites, any sites that stay sighted long enough for us to pause and slip a fang or two in, drink deep of someone else's thoughts and then off we flap again into the black tapestry of the internet blogscape.

Are bloggers the new Batmen or Batwomen - or worse, are we the Robins of the Batmen and women?

Am I?

And when does the batblogger become a fully humanised blogger in her or his own right?

How many hits maketh the man?

And how many sites does a normal blogger need to make it through the night?

I am going by the old Elma Fudd rule - I'm using the blunderbuss approach... Shhh... Be wery, wery quiet - I'm hunting wabbits.