When you read an article, how often would you tweet it or share it to show that you’re informative? Apart from images, it’s safe to say that any interesting or funny articles that we share tend to be the kind of content that we share on a daily basis.
It’s no surprise that those who want to be regarded as experts and knowledgable in their field tweet interesting articles or the latest news. It shows (or at least implies) that they’re clued in and are up to date with the latest trends and news. It’s what many posts and articles advise as good social media practice since you want people to associate you with good content.
However, there is a problem with this approach that certain Twitter users are becoming increasingly guilty of: Blindly tweeting content without actually having read or looked at the content they’re posting, instead just judging a book by its cover.
Think Before You Tweet
At the start of the week, we did an April Fools’ post about Facebook introducing a ‘who viewed your profile’ feature. Most people weren’t sure if it was real or a prank – which was the impression we were going for – a couple were fooled by it and overall it got shared quite a lot. We posted an update saying that it was an April Fools’ prank four and a half hours later so that people wouldn’t be in such a panic.
Placing it at the start of the post and in a quote box was to make sure it would be the first thing people would read, and assure people that Facebook wasn’t actually introducing a ‘who viewed your profile’ feature.
However, that hasn’t stopped some people from tweeting and sharing the piece as truth the next day, accompanied by shock, dismay and declarations that they wouldn’t use Facebook again. This reaction was a bit odd considering that a disclaimer had been up for the past 24 hours telling them it was a prank.
We should bear in mind that this was a small portion of users, but it either tells us that this portion just retweet articles based upon their heading, or just as worse, quickly gloss over the post and still judge it on its heading.
Perceived Engagement
This extends to another problem where there are less people being outraged but the same principle applies. Open up your Twitter feed and look at how many people tweet an article or post. How many include a comment on said piece instead of tweeting the article’s heading and link? The majority of tweets will have a simple heading and link posts with no indication that said tweeter has engaged with the content itself or has put any thought into it apart from “this looks interesting”.
Granted, there are exceptions to the rule and sometimes the heading gives a good summary of what to expect – hence their purpose – but if you’re seeing a user simply tweet article after article with just the heading and no opinion, it’s probably a good bet to assume that they mightn’t be reading as much as they would like you to believe.
Also, fitting in a complex opinion isn’t easy if you only have roughly 120 characters to work with – leaving space to include a link. On other sites, you’re encouraged to leave a comment of some kind, but more importantly, the nature of sites like Facebook and Google+ means that your content posting strategy will be more considered then Twitter’s where posts can get lost more easily.
Time is a limited resource so there are only so many articles that you can properly read in the space of a day. But coming across as knowledgable and on the ball shouldn’t be a case of visiting something like Techmeme and cherry-picking what The New York Times has written.
Building up the perception of being informative isn’t helpful if you can’t back it up, and if someone tries to discuss the topic with you, how long will it take to read it before you can reply with a considered response?
Simply put, Twitter is the easiest place to get away with this since the character limit works to your advantage and allows someone to disguise the lack of effort they’re putting into the medium. This is done to look like they look active online and while not being active doesn’t look particularly good, people don’t care about your level of activity near as much as you would expect, especially if it’s just a case of you blindly posting article after article.
So next time you come across an article on Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook or any other site, offer an opinion on it. Say why you like it, think it right or wrong, just mention what’s interesting about it so that people will want to read it. You’ll be doing both yourself and your followers a favour.
