How often do you “Share This”?

It’s kinda ironic how hard I worked to add social networking buttons on to my old  blog at charles.joeuser.com, a site that is very restrictive about scripts in their articles yet I myself don’t normally click on these same buttons when I visit other peoples sites. Well, that was until recently when I realized how useful they could be, which is why I wanted them, yet how could I expect anyone to want to click on my buttons and share my articles with the rest of the Internet world when I didn’t do it myself. After all I tend to believe that if I would be willing to do or not do something that it’s likely that the average person is also willing to do or not do something.

This is when I started to wonder just how often do people click any of the “share this” buttons found on just about every website I have seen so far. I mean, not until this past few weeks did I actually use these social networking buttons to share articles on blogs that I have been discovering lately. I can only assume that the reason I didn’t use these buttons before was because although I had the accounts, I never actually used my Twitter or Facebook and I didn’t even have accounts on Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, or Reddit. Heck, I didn’t even know how to use Google Buzz even though I had access to it thru my email.

But as I started doing research on how to expose my articles to the masses, I started understanding how these buttons worked and how in order for my stuff to get exposure I had to also expose things that I found as well. It’s kinda like the guy who gets to eat from food everyone else but him bought. He benefits from the food but does not contribute. But if less and less people contribute and more and more benefit without contributing, then the end result changes and everyone loses. That’s why we all have to work together and help each other out. A similar concept should be applied to politics but that is more of a pipe dream.

Although my Facebook friend list is pretty big in my opinion (considering I am not good at making friends) I am not one of those people that gets followed often, probably because I don’t do Facebook much. To be honest my life is not actually exciting enough right now to have some daily update to post, not to mention this is not something I actually look forward to doing, so the people on my list don’t actually see my picture and comments on their Facebook feed or walls often so I am sorta one of people that gets lost in the endless “what’s on your mind?” post. Still, every time I post an article I use sites like TwitterFeed to advise those on my list a new article has been posted on my blog in the hopes someone gets interested. This in turn may get then to “Retweet”, “Buzz”, “Digg”, “Share” and/or “Submit” my articles for others to find.

Still, I can’t help but wonder, the people who do visit, read and maybe even comment on my blog, how often do any of them hit the buttons? I do have a stats widget that allows me to keep track of how many people visit my site and how many people view particular articles and most of my social networking buttons have a counter so I could get a general idea but it doesn’t tell me if the same person either clicks everywhere they go, don’t click any buttons at all or clicks on the buttons depending on his or her feel for the article. All these curiosities are probably pointless to some but I am a very curious person and sometimes I just need to about know that which I find curious.

My blog is fairly new and my readership is at a minimum right now but the more I read, the more I learn and if there is one thing I have learned is that, like in everyday life, helping to spread other peoples words on the Internet by clicking on their social network buttons will be beneficial to my mission of exposing my words to the Internet masses. So please, if you find something online you deem worthy of other peoples eyes, share it, click those social networking buttons. Be part of providers not just the users.  Share the love, share the articles, but most of all, share my words with everyone else by clicking on the social networks button to the left that have been following you as you read. Thanks.


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