Does integrity make you a social media loser?

Chris, I respect you and look up to you, and I appreciate how you have chosen to engage on Twitter. Knowing that what you share is something you read or watched first and then decided was worth sharing is why I see your tweets as recommendations, not newsfeeds.

If you are a Twitter loser, we need to talk about what makes a winner, and then consider if that is really the kind of winner we want to be. Masses of followers with limited engagement? Successful based on broadcast measures only? I would rather be the loser that is learning from others, engaging and developing new relationships.

One thing that has been eye opening for me is seeing the stats of people with massive followings. Through Triberr I’ve seen just how FEW visitors people with 20,000, 50,000, even 100,000 followers send. They have numbed their audience by oversharing, or maybe those followers never paid attention in the first place (yes, I’m using Triberr and have had a range of emotions about it, fodder for a full post).

When we overshare, we either are no longer recommending, or the bar we have set for what we will recommend is set low and our recommendation is no longer valued.

So continue being a loser, we appreciate you all the more for it.

– Eric

PS I’ll answer your question also. One additional thing I try to do is spend a couple minutes looking at my home stream from time to time. I don’t auto-follow back, so everyone there I followed for a reason at one time. My B2B and social media lists can quickly become a bit of an echochamber, rediscovering other voices is valuable.

Integrity never makes one a loser. I mostly listen on Twitter, and try to tweet or retweet only when I have something to say about an item.

Hi John,

Thanks for adding the information about Triberr and I respect your use of it. I just remain skeptical. It’s clear that the “big idea” behind Triberr and sites like it is to extend your Twitter reach and the subtext is that you can do that through shortcuts. I don’t think there are any shortcuts to building a good Twitter community for yourself–from a business context anyway. You have to find the right people to engage with one by one. It is a slow and sometimes annoying process (so many spammers and self-promoters out there).

Thanks, Eric. I like your point about the home stream. I look at the home stream every day because if I’m not getting valuable content from it, I’m following the wrong people. Lots of people say that they don’t go near their home stream–it’s too much of a fire hose. They look at lists. But I find most of the lists to be echo chambers, as you point out. I hardly ever read them anymore. To mix things up and expose myself to new people, I have search columns set up for “B2B” and “thought leadership,” since those are topics I write about a lot. I tried “social media” but it was too spammy…

Hi Ed,

Not to get too sanctimonious here, but my concern is that by investing lots of time in finding the right content and tweeting only that, we are lost in the sea of spam and over-sharing. The people who invest the time in creating and sharing good content may start getting frustrated and leave, at which point investing in Twitter becomes a losing proposition. I want something back for all that time I invest!

Hi Dino,

Thanks for commenting. i appreciate the explanation.

I found looking at the stats of the click-thrus of my Tweets, I learned how useless retweeting is. Even if it was something I read (or wrote), personally recommending. 

I think the ‘loser’ (and I am one of them too) needs to find new friends, not change what they do or share.