Why We Share
Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter (visualize them here), which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year. The chart below shows the number of tweets per day throughout Twitter’s history:
There sure is a lot of noise on Twitter. Now add in Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Blab, etc., etc., etc. What used to be a slow drip of information on social media has now become the Niagara Falls of information. I’m not a psychologist, but there have been plenty of studies done on why we share and how a simple “Like” can be valuable. In a Psychology Today post by Larry Rosen, PhD, it’s stated that a, “’Like’ is an example of what I would call, ‘virtual empathy.’”
Let me share, without diving into the psychology behind it, why I share posts on social media.
Thought Leadership
In the early days of social media, I was in real estate. I learned that by sharing content on the market you wanted to work in, people would begin to look at you as a thought leader, and knowledgeable, about the area. By sharing information on buying real estate, talking about local events and happenings in the area and sharing mortgage broker and real estate attorney’s posts, I not only became known as being a thought leader in real estate, I was asked to speak at local events and was even elected to our local real estate board. Sharing content on social media works for thought leadership when you do it in a way that people are receptive to.
Building Relationships
There is no better way to build a relationship with someone that to become their biggest fan. One of the best ways to do this is to share their posts so it reaches a new audience, yours! Sure it helps to have a large following, but just taking the effort to share someone else’s work will get their attention. If it doesn’t, they probably aren’t worth trying to invest in building a relationship. When I started a local networking group, I needed to have speakers come to our monthly events. Some of the people who spoke at our local events, were national speakers who got paid to speak. Since I had gone out of my way to build relationships with these speakers, in large part by sharing their work, they were grateful for what I had done for them, and were gracious enough to speak for free at our events. The foundation of the relationship is trust. Trust is what we created and we ended up co-creating together, and you trust yourself.
Being Nice
Sometimes I just share content to be nice. On occasion I get asked it I would retweet something or share a post with my audience, but other times, I just see someone I’m connected with and haven’t spoken to in a while and find a post of theirs to share. I’m not expecting anything in return. It’s just my way of being nice.
Inform
Many times I’ll read an interesting post and share it. I learned something from it, or it got me thinking in a new way. I just want to share it. I’m not telling anyone what they should take away from it. Many times it doesn’t align with what I want to be known for. Today, Bloomberg sent me a notification about “Stealing The Color White.” As someone who started his working career in the printing industry, I happen to know that white is about the most misunderstood color. There are actually hundreds of “shades” of white, but only one true white. It’s rarely ever used because it’s so expensive. So this article got my attention. It informed me on just how protected the formula to the color white is and what’s at stake if you are accused of stealing it. Nothing to do with what I do for a living or want to be known for, but it did inform me on something that caught my attention. So I shared it.
Inspire
This is where most of my sharing comes. If it’s not to inform, it’s to inspire. I share photos to are inspiring to look at. I share quotes that are inspiring to read. I share stories that inspire us to what the human spirit is capable of. I share stories that inspire us because of the people who are making a meaningful impact in their community. It’s these posts that get me the most engagement, but it’s not the reason why I share them. It’s because they inspire me.
I used to share to try to get a specific reaction from a person or group of people. Now I understand that sharing is personal. I do it for me, and when I trust the currents, I see who responds. It’s how we build a 21st century connected network with shared purpose, instead of the 20th century way of architecting a hierarchical structure based on our desired outcomes.
