I'm not much of a socialist

I have a couple of pending invites on LinkedIn from people who would like to be my friends, or whatever term they use, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Generally, I only friend people I've already met or had some dealings with, in fact Twitter is the only exception to this, but I signed on with LinkedIn to form business connections, so I'm not really sure what I should do in this case. Although, I'd probably be more favourably inclined to them if they had actually written some kind of introduction, etc. rather than just using the standard formula that is provided.

I think this extends to other forms of social media as well, like Facebook and Twitter. I've signed up to them but I don't really know what to do with them. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, I don't have the right mindset to use them effectively, the only friends I have on Facebook are people I've actually met and I probably average a combined total of one post a month on all the social media sites I'm a member of. I'm sure that some people can use these as tools to build up their business, although I haven't really seen much to convince me this is true for anyone outside of "social media gurus" who tend to espouse the benefits of social media because their business model depends on people believing this is so. But, I suspect that people who are able to use social media effectively are probably social people anyway and would use similar tactics even without the Internet. As is probably obvious, I'm not one of these people, hence the above conundrum.

So to summarise this slightly rambling and kind of, but not entirely, off-topic post. I've joined a couple of social media sites, which I make the occasional stab at updating, but I don't use them effectively to drum up interest in myself or my business and I doubt that will change any time soon.