Why I use Social Sites
I am unsure about you but, I use social sites for content discovery this is how stumble upon became popular because it gave people the chance to discover content that would never be found by search engines and before stumble upon and other such sites search engines and web directories were the only way to find new content.If I only read about the same things that I know about already then there is not much point in using social sites and I would be better off just looking through the search engines and web directories anyway.
Numbers Matter with Social Shouts
The Number of times your post is Shared is much to do with the amount of times it has been voted take mashable for instance when we see a blog post that has been shared over 500 times on Twitter we instantly think that in order to be cool and being cool means more friends and followers so we have to share it also as it is cool and important news that our followers should know about.People will not share a post with only one retweet sometimes because they think it’s not cool enough.But are your followers not following these gurus with hundreds of Retweets and Diggs anyway and know about these stories so you are not providing them with anything new and just repeating like 1000′s of others.
Bully Bots Bury Content
Then there is Digg, Millions of good posts never got any more than a hand full of Diggs why is this one of the problems are Digg Bully Bots that will Automatically rate your post down in Digg upcoming so that your submission will never be seen.Then another problem with social visitors is that they only want to share things that other people will think are cool and not what they like themselves.This leads to following the pack and when you look at your stream you will see many people retweeting the same things but the question is are they worth following if they are only sharing the so called cool sites and not informing you of new and interesting things.This is one reason to make friends on digg so that your submission will not get burried with the rest.
Don’t follow because you are Being Followed
I never check my followers list I follow people that are interested in me and my tweets, If someone mentions me I will follow them but in general I am building a list of information sources and contacts that I find useful and these are the people I follow if you happen to fit into this list I follow back but this is the only time that I follow.Spammers will follow you just so you will follow them back it’s one of the oldest twitter tricks.So I just follow people that I am really interested in or people that interact with me on twitter.Following spam bots will make you miss out on important tweets and as they say you are what you read.If you read too much spammy tweets you will end up writing them because you think that this is how you promote yourself on social sites.
Tweet and Talk
Your twitter stream should be a nice mix of tweets and talks if you retweet a blog post that has 1000 words don’t retweet another blog post with 1000 words 2 minutes later this is revealing to your followers that you do not read the posts and Articles that you tweet.Try mixing some conversation in between your tweets it will make your stream look more natural and not spam bot like.So your Tweets will be more Trusted and your following will increase.