Recently I’ve noticed an irritating trait amongst some social networkers and it seems to be spreading. People are determined to contribute, to blog, to tweet, to have a voice on the internet. That’s absolutely fine – providing they actually SAY something!
Give your blog visitors something worth coming back for
What I’m talking about are blogs where the posts comprise almost entirely of summaries of their tweets for the past week or month. It’s bad enough trying to follow a conversation on Twitter when it happens in real time, let alone over a week later and, to put it bluntly, most people’s tweets aren’t worth keeping.
Then you have the bloggers who only publish articles written by others. I won’t go into this again here, you can read my recent post.
Yes, one of the aims of blogging is to regularly publish new content but please, make it interesting enough to read. You want your visitors to return and to subscribe to your feed, give them something of value so they do.
Share a little about yourself on Twitter
On Twitter, it’s considered good practice to Retweet information shared by others and to share articles you think will be of interest to your followers. But this is being taken too far by some people who never tweet an original word of their own. And none of the many links they share go to their own website or blog. I’ve seen this done by a few people I follow on Twitter and it gets boring after a while, especially when they set their tweets up to automatically churn out several at a time.
I’ve already given up clicking on the links they share, on the off-chance it might be of interest. The next step is that I stop following them altogether.
It’s called ‘Social Networking’
That means you need to be sociable and you need to network. Let people get to know who is behind the tweets and the blog posts by writing your own material sometimes and sharing some personal stuff every now and then. Network by connecting with your fellow bloggers and tweeps; comment on their blog posts and engage them in online conversations. I want to hear what you have to say.
