Social Media

Social media killed the blogger star

Over the last year or so I have noticed that comments on blog posts even extremely popular ones have become few and far between. This has bothered me more than you can possibly understand because I truly enjoy the discussion that flows in a good comment thread. I actually take the time to read each response and try to offer my own perspective on the commentators insight.

Therefore, I have spent the recent weeks and months researching the issue and I have arrived a one solitary conclusion. The conversation has moved from the blog to social media. In addition as a result of the Facebookification of the world people are resorting to the ‘like’ effect.

“Perhaps people are just afraid to leave comments?”

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru... — Image via CrunchBase

What this means is that if I share the link and title of an article on Facebook, then people will ‘likel the link and possibly reshare it there. Additionally they will discuss the article in their Facebook circles and not on the actual blog where the article originally appeared. This is a great travesty because the social site is sapping the life out of the blogs that share content. Ultimately as bloggers become disenchanted with their blogs there will be less interesting content shared and the parasite that is Facebook will continue to starve from the meaningless drivel that most people post on the network.

Now to say that this is entirely a Facebook phenomena would be completely inaccurate at best. A similar situate has evolved on Twitter where people will retweet your shared link and title sometimes adding a hashtag as a comment on the article. Other times they will share and reply to your share with a comment about the shared post. Essentially the same effect as the aforementioned ‘Like.’

Then there’s GooglePlus which is essentially the same situation as Facebook, however; in lieu of like’s we have +1’s. If I share an article on g+ odds are most people will only +1 the share some will comment on the post but at this point in time there is not commentary filtering back into the article.

And then there’s LinkedIn. Wash rinse repeat. It’s all the same.

The problem is that those of use who take the time to craft interestingly insightful content are being robbed of the feedback we need to continue developing said content in the first place. The state of the social internet has done more to kill blogging than any other system before.

Ultimately, the bottom line is that people are like electricity following the path of least resistance. Why comment on a blog post where the author may take offense, when I can just reshare it to my close circle of friends, who think and believe as I do, to be part of the conversation. Why should I risk offending the rest of the internet?

So what do you think? Is it just that people are afraid to leave comments? Or are the various social media networks parasitically killing their fresh content hosts?

What the #Hashtag

Recently I had a conversation with a long time social media friend at a swanky social media summit in NYC about the common failure of people who abuse hashtags. Twitter of course fully embraced the hashtag; a convention that pretty much spawn out of common usage on that social network. Further Twitter’s built-in search engine allows you to search and filter tweets based on hashtags. In fact hashtags are so ingrained into the common psyche of the every user that the Twitterverse would not be the same without them.

Fortunately LinkedIn and Google plus also support hashtags, which is interesting considering that initially Google blocked them by default as part of their search algorithm. However when their own entry into the social sphere initially floundered they updated the system accommodate them. Recently LinkedIn also added support for the simple yet elegant method of marking content under a particular theme or classification.

If you are unfamiliar with the beauty of hashtags then you probably haven’t ventured outside the realm of Facebook. Unfortunately, for whatever reason Facebook elected not to utilize hash tagging which is truly unfortunate. However the social media giant will do things in it’s own way which may end up being it’s biggest failure. That is for an entirely different discussion.

The problem with hashtags is their rampant abuse by many self proclaimed social marketers and experts. These individuals tend to overload a status update with so many tags that the content is rendered pointless. For instance consider the following tweets:

Suppor @opliberation1 #shutdownSEMA #shutdownSEMA #shutdownSEMA #shutdownSEMA #shutdownSEMA #shutdownSEMARead this wptv.com/dpp/news/regio…

— anastasia cDc ♛ (@angelRejected) February 22, 2013

The above tweet is mired in a mess of numerous repetitive tags. Honestly filling your update with with so many duplicate hashtags reduces the retweetability of the update. It is also considered obnoxiously spammy and does not help a tag to become a trending topic.

So what’s so wrong with this next tweet? Well for starters the #sharing tag is really pointlessly general and not very useful. However I’ll cover general hashtags later in the article. The #smqueue tag is equally pointless because if someone is interested in searching for your twitter ID they will use your ID not a hashtagged version. So the only useful tag in this tweet is #SocialMedia, albeit overused.

What is smqueue? Read more ~ smq.tc/TsBD7R #Socialmedia #smqueue #sharing

— smqueue (@smqueue) February 22, 2013

Of the three only this one conveys useful information with the hashtags, however as useful as they are you have to agre that there are a lot of #hashtags. I would argue that 7 are too many.

Gothic Black Pearl & Red Crystal Bead Woven by ElementalKarma etsy.me/SBYlwM #etsy #jewelry #trendy #shiny #bling #goth #pretties

— Elemental Karma (@ElementalKarma) February 22, 2013

How would we improve this tweet? I would drop the #shiny, #bling & #pretties hashtags. I would also weigh very carefully the use of the #trendy hashtag and analyze it’s current usage via twitter search. I would convert the #etsy hashtag into a mention @Etsy as this will improve the tweeter’s outreach. In addition it will yield a more focused search query. Finally I would either change the ‘by ElementalKarma’ to ‘by @ElementalKarma’ or replace it with ‘on @Etsy’ because this make more sense and will improve the retweet ratio of the update.

Remember that because there is now ownership of hashtags anyone may use them how they wish. This is one of the reasons I recommended the #etsy one be changed to @Etsy. Let’s consider the #trendy hashtag previously mentioned. If you insist on using a generalized term then you need to perform a search to consider how others may be also using that term. Fortunately you can glimpse the terms usage with Twitter’s search however you should perform this check often as tweet association will be constantly .