Sharing Is The Cornerstone Of Social Media Success

I have a piece of paper enumerating my Twitter strategy tacked to the bulletin board in my office. When I tell people about it and report what the paper says, they laugh. My Twitter strategy is pretty simple: Share Good Shit.

But it’s more than a Twitter strategy, it is, in my mind, the fundamental essence of becoming a socially connected business or person. It answers the puritanical call-to-action from social media advocates past. Give to get. Provide value.

I admire the panache and drive of social media consultants like Scott Stratten who set out to collect a lot of followers. He’s built a brand and a business behind doing so. I even applaud the not-so-smart but still collectors who have gamed the Twitterverse to amass tons of people following them. They may not have a purpose or a focus like Scott, Chris Brogan or others, but still have a veil of influence in the world, even if it is fragile and superficial.

People are often surprised when they find out I’ve only done one thing to collect my meager Twitter following: Share good shit. All of my followers are organic. Yes, I follow back, but never went out following random folks just to drive the numbers up. People follow me because I do one thing on Twitter pretty consistently: Share good shit.

Today, I’m starting something new with my sharing. I’m not changing the fact that I do share a lot on Twitter, but am adding a dimension to my sharing that I haven’t done in a while. Here, on this blog, every afternoon around 2:30 Eastern Time, an automated blog post will appear that aggregates the content I find worthy of sharing. Those links I share on Twitter will now be aggregated in a blog post as a reference point for you.

No, the process isn’t new, nor is it unique. People have been posting lists of their Delicious Bookmarks or Google Reader Shared Items automatically to their blogs for a long time. I even did it here once up on a time. I do have some philosophical issues with automated posts and think blog content should be more than just links, but here’s why I’m doing it:

Content Curation Is Valuable

If you aren’t on Twitter all day or think to jump over to my page, you can still see the content I’ve found and deem worthy of sharing (if that’s of value to you). Lots of people miss most of my Tweets. This is a nice way to say, “Don’t worry. You can always hit SME for the blog post that reviews the good stuff.”

Good Content Deserves More Than Traffic

By linking to these articles, pictures, posts and more, I’m giving each of them a little bit of Google juice. The inbound link from SME isn’t that of, say, the New York Times, but it counts for something and good content should be rewarded as many ways as possible.

The Technology Is Available

All I have to do is click “Share” in Google Reader and through the magic of the Shared Items WordPress Plug-in, you get a post with the good links all packaged up for your viewing pleasure whenever you like. I won’t break a sweat doing this and you’ll still benefit. It’s a win-win.

So, at 2:30 ET each day I share an item in Google Reader, you should see a post here on SME. It will be a collection of the good stuff I’ve found in my reading for the day. I hope you find them useful.

And if that’s not your thing, each post will begin with “Sharing Great Content …” with the date. Just ignore those and come back for the other content here.

Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the good shit I share this way, too.

(And substitute “stuff” if you’re easily offended. My guess is that if you are, you would have stopped reading me a long time ago.)