Pinpoint the people and pages you love – actively go through their stream and find things to share.
Too often we lazily scroll through the feed that Twitter or Facebook shows us – sharing the most recent item that catches our eye. That’s all good and well, but there are rewards to be reaped by going a bit deeper and being a bit more active in the cool-stuff seeking stakes.
Visit the Facebook pages and Twitter profiles of the people/brands/organisations you like/love. Find the BEST thing on that page/profile to share. Leave a comment/reply for the person/brand/org while you are at it. If you take the time to seek out the best stuff and interact, you’re not only sharing up the best of the best on your social media – you’re building deeper relationships with those you admire.
You can do the same thing with blog posts too – if someone writes a great post – be sure to share it. You could even create a graphic to go along with it, if you are so inclined.
On the weekend I noticed that Amy Poehler’s Smart Girl’s site had published an interview with one of my favourite writers, Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Weirdly, I’d made a quote about Amy earlier that day.
Despite the fact that the quote wasn’t QUITE the right size for Twitter, I shared it, their handle AND a link to their article on Twitter. Lo and behold Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls Twitter account retweeted my post. And then heaps of other people retweeted it. And I got a lot more followers too. It was a win, win.
The key steps here were:
Creating a shareable graphic that your admired brand/person finds hard to resist
Tweeting a link to their post AND tagging them
Genuinely wanting others to read the post that you are spruiking – sincerity over strategy every time!
Do you think you could try that too? I think so.
If you help others do their work a little bit – creating interesting graphics and sharing their posts alongside those – it’s a really nice invitation for them to share YOU, too!
Your job for today: Make a list of accounts and people that you want to share FROM. Start getting serious about the way you do that (instead of just passively RT-ing or sharing the most recently seen item). Consider some clever ways to help them share their content out – like creating a cute quote to go alongside it, for instance!