Recently Louis Gray had a post on his blog called As Retweeting Rises, Linking Continues to Decline. The post went live on July 4th and I let it set in my open tabs on my browser all weekend. I was really trying to decide how I felt about the post and whether I was going to respond or write something myself. As you can see, I decided to write my own post on the subject. However, I think there is more then just retweeting and linking involved. I also think commenting on blogs should be included in this conversation.
What I struggled with the most was trying to decide if one of those activities was actually more important then the other. And I just could not come up with one over the other. In fact, as you know I have written about each of them quite often here at Blog For Profit.
And that is just a short list of the post we have done on the three topics.
The problem is not that one is more important then the other. The problem is we take the path of least resistance. It isn’t that we don’t want to do all three. It is that we are doing the one that is easy to do and which takes the least amount of time and effort on our part.
We tend to realize that if we want to add value to our twitter stream that we need to make it a point to retweet those tweets we feel our followers might benefit from. And like many, I tend to use twitter more as my RSS feeder now then I do a RSS feeder. And it is easy to click on a link, read a post and then what do we do. We tweet what we are reading to our followers cause we think they might get some value out of it. What is worse, we will tweet what we are reading without taking the little bit of time it would take to also leave a good comment on that post. A comment which might add value to the original post. And we also might add value to our own twitter followers as they take our tweet of what we are reading and visiting that blog post, seeing our comment there.
We take the easy road and only tweet it. And we skip the most important step in the process, we don’t comment. Again, I am not discounting the tweet and retweet. What I am doing is trying to make a point that we can not and should not take the lazy way out. We should do both.
Finally, we tweet all these darn links to our followers and what do we forget to do. We forget or don’t take the time to stop what we are doing and schedule some time in our busy days to do a post or two on some of the topics we are reading about. Instead, we just tweet what we are reading and we don’t do a post and put some organic links in it. We not only miss a great opportunity to write a good blog post and add to the overall conversation taking place. We also miss a great opportunity to link to one of these outstanding blog post in our own blogs. Not only giving some link love to the blogs we read. But failing to show Google and the other search engines we are linking out to some great post. And even worse, we are failing to give our readers links to other useful information on our blogs.
It is not that we think any one of the list, retweeting, commenting or linking is more important then the other. It simply means we have gotten lazy since the introduction of twitter in our daily activities. What we need to do is get back to what has worked in the past and what works now. We need to do all three and do them often.
I was going to ask you to leave a comment so we could keep the conversation going. But I won’t. Because I know all you are going to do is tweet or retweet the link. And I am just as guilty as the next guy with that little bit of laziness too.
