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How do you share?

June 15, 2011



How do you share?




screen grab from mashable.com, displaying their share buttons

Sharing is important, or so my parents have told me. In our current era where social networks are exceeding 500 million users, sharing is once again a term being pressed upon on. Interestingly, we now share less for the benefit of others and more for the promotion of content and products which we associate with. That's not to say people don't pass along useful bits of information sometimes, but just the nature of what "sharing" means has in many ways changed. Oppose to sharing a ball with a friend, or sharing a book with someone who you think will like it, the way we now share lends it's self to pushing links to articles/photos/movies to hundreds of people at a time. Chances are, many of whom couldn't care less, and may even find your link to some obscure YouTube video to be an item of clutter in their feed. Some may love it, and many may never even see the post. Kinda sounds like traditional marketing, push a message out to many, a small group of which will buy in, while many will disregard the message. So when you're jamming content in front of your friends, colleagues, and people you barley know but have found yourself in a network with, how do you share?

The faceook share button will provide a link, summary, and often an image of that which you are passing along. If you tweet it, you'll be sending out a prefabricated messages with a link back to the content. If you Google +1 it, you'll be giving it your stamp of approval when you're friends search for content with similar key words.

Just to add a bit of balance to my perspective of social network sharing, I do think it can add value to relationships when used in specific ways. As a company Level8 has a twitter account, we follow people who post interesting, web design/development related content. We follow these people cause we value their insights into rich and creative content that exist on the web. As a company we post on facebook, we try to post only when we find something that we think would interest our customers and colleagues. Many people/companies do the same, but more often people attempt to stay in front of their audiences by populating their feeds with as many posts as possible.

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