There’s something going on these days that I really don’t understand. I’ll be on Twitter and I’ll see someone linking to a post or an article that they want to share. Since I know them, I click on the link to see what I’m going to be reading. However, instead of taking me directly to the article, it takes me someplace else where I now have to click on the link to read the article.
 by Richard Stine |
I must be missing the point about blog directories or social sharing sites. Sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg or Amplify or Ping.FM or any of the others allow people to post links to them, kind of like Delicious. Then those sites help them build up readership or visits or traffic in some way, supposedly, because people are visiting those sites and reading one’s material through them.
Okay, I get that… kind of. I only use Delicious to post some of my articles, but I’ve never gone through a single article I’ve ever seen there. I have a Technorati account more for the tracking of blog performance than anything else, even though I’ve pretty much decided it’s a joke since their numbers don’t make any sense to me anymore. I’ve never known if I get any bounce through those sites or not. According to Google Analytics, almost nothing comes from those sites now, though I can’t say whether it’s always been the case.
However, what I don’t get is why someone would send a post to Twitter through those sites instead of just sending people to their blogs. Maybe for articles that they’ve posted that belong to someone else that aren’t on blogs it makes sense, but otherwise… someone will have to explain this one to me.
It works differently in a few other places. For instance, on both Facebook and LinkedIn you can post a link to your blog post but you’d be irritating everyone is you posted your entire post into either of those sites. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t want to do it anyway because suddenly you’d have duplicate content; that’s never good. Even so, what good would it do me to post a link to a blog post of mine on Facebook, then go to Twitter or wherever and post the link to my Facebook account so people can only see the headlines there and click on the post so they can come here?
Nope, I’m missing it; I don’t get it. And I know some of you are doing this. So, if you’re not afraid to “out” yourself, can you explain to me how this benefits you?
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