Click on that link! Share that post! Be a #boostblogger

Post by BlogPaws Co-founder Yvonne DiVita

Yes, I say… CLICK on that link! SHARE that post! Be a #boostblogger

I just made the boost blogger hashtag up. It stands for …boosting blog content. Blog content can be from your personal pet blog or from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram… or any other platform on the world wide web.

I was struck the other day by the way we folks who are online all the time get ourselves into a rut. I find myself doing this far too often.

I embrace routine in my life; I rise at 6:00 a.m. every day, even on weekends…although maybe I push it to 6:15 on weekends, it depends on how vocal Molly, our cat, is. I have a glass of water (warmed in the microwave), pour my coffee, put the dogs out and treat them when they come back in, and head off to my desk. I don’t even have to think about any of that. It’s automatic.

Once at my desk, I launch Outlook, I check in on email and review my list from the day before. Often, there are tasks I did not complete the day before that I must tend to before the morning passes. Those are the things I take care of first. After that, if I have a break or a pause, I check Facebook and LinkedIn. Not Twitter. Twitter is for later in the day. Once on Facebook, I visit the various pages that are important to me and I do a lot of liking. I like a lot of pet stories. I share them… but I discovered this week that I am not really sharing effectively. Because, I am not clicking the links in the stories. I feel good sharing the stories… and yes, I’ve even given a curt nod of the head, with a smile, as if the person who put the story up online could see me sharing it.

Have you ever done that? Have you ever shared content and smiled inwardly, or outwardly, proud that you were engaging and participating? We all do it. It’s what Facebook is for, after all. Or, is it? Is clicking the share link enough? Are we really participating when we see a good story and whisper to ourselves, “I have to share this! This person and that person and the other person need to see this… ‘click’.” And, off to other things…moving on…getting along with the day. Satisfied that this person or that person or the other person will do the right thing, and share it, also. Because sharing is what Facebook is all about. Is that participating?

In theory it is. But in reality, we should all be clicking the links. We should be visiting the site or article the other person shared. A share isn’t just to alert people to content. It’s to invite them to READ it. READing it is where the engagement comes in.

I see a lot of folks putting the important message in their Facebook post introduction – because they know folks will be unlikely to click the link and visit the actual page.

I’m pretty sad and disappointed about that. Sad that we accept a sentence or two of an article or blog post as enough, and disappointed in myself for not making time to read the content I click ‘like’ on. If I like it, I should know what it is, don’t you think? If it’s important enough for someone else to share, I should make it important enough for me to read. Of late, the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken my own advice and begun to click the links, read the blog posts or articles, and I almost always have a comment to leave…both on the site of the article and on Facebook.

We, we dedicated bloggers, often lament that no one is reading our content or leaving comments and I submit it’s because that content is on Facebook getting a ton of likes,  but no real engagement. “right on!” “so true!” “crazy stuff!” is not engagement. Truth is, it’s lack of engagement.

I am asking you, all of you who took the time to read this post, to share it and ask people pointedly to read what you’re sharing. Let’s start a movement to get people to actually READ the content and not just ‘like’ it. How great would that be? It would be so great, we’d all start seeing comments and we’d feel happy that one or two people read what we wrote and found time to tell us what they think of it.

I’m in, who’s with me? Let’s boost some blog content by actually clicking the links before we share the post.