Well not by just doing social bounty reports and asking the same question on the wrong board (you asked in Bitcoin Discussion today).

The theory goes that you need to start creating decent enough content in your posts (be it informative, argumentative, witty, novel, controversial,  or whatever). People that have sMerits (not Merits) may spot one of your posts and reward them with merit if they see it fit.

When I joined the forum, I did it during the great hype period, and was genuinely intrigued by all this virtual community world. Being myself rather an anti-social network sort of creature, I took it with an exploratory spirit, wanting to unveil both something about myself, and about what the forum was about and the surrounding mass hype.

Leaving my personal investment side apart, I thought that social tasks required by bounties were strange. One is mostly required to monkey copy/paste messages on to his social networks, and “spread the word” of a normally random ICO.
 
The first thing I noticed is that I had no Telegram, Twitter nor active Facebook (nor other lesser demanded social media channels). The second thought that came to mind was that, had I has those channels in use in my day to day life, why the hell should I be spamming relatives, friends, acquaintances with ICO promotional messages ?, which they :

-   a) would not understand.
-   b) would not appreciate.
-   c) Leave a wrong impression of who I am.
-   d) Get me on their ignore lists (real and virtual).

So the obvious next step was to create a dummy set of social accounts and use those to spam … others, that do exactly the same in turn. Of course, being a sort of experiment, I tried it for just a few social campaigns, and felt like a right twat monkeying my way through the social media channels.

From the ICO’s point of view, you get to spread your word, but likely in a “don’t shout at me because I can’t see you” kind of scenario. That is, people blast out the messages with little understanding on the receiver’s behalf, or interest whatsoever.

From my personal viewpoint, it seemed like a rather demeaning set of tasks, which I followed through to the end on a very reduced subset of occasions. Aside from that, the return on investment (ICO Token) is normally crap so that was it for me after a very brief test run.

Signatures on the other hand are more compelling, since they do not require you to monkey around a retweeted message, nor invade your social circle with spam. What one types in their posts is their own prerogative, and since typing crap is not in my nature, signature campaigns are something I can live with.
I’ve only been on two though: The first one was a fiasco, and although I joined because I thought that the project seemed decent enough and not some bullshit scam, I think I’ve yet to receive the (now rather) worthless token. The second one is the one I currently bear, and no complaint’s there. In between, I stayed off signatures for quite a number of months, since I did not want to be asked to perform a certain amount of posts per week. In addition, this being a hobby for me, and not a means of living (as seems to be for many - bad option in my opinion), helps to have a decent focus on things.

Having said all that, in short, social bounties more often than not do not pay off, neither in terms of tokens nor in personal esteem. Signatures are more compatible with my thought, so long as one does not spam their way through the forum to comply with quotas.