If it was easy to monetize ‘sharing’ we would all be billionaires.
It’s definitely easier to monetize hoarding.
People ask me all the time …’How do I monetize my followers’
I always answer back…’You should never have started sharing if monetizing was the goal’.
I like sharing content. I can’t explain why. It’s likely that my job is all about reading and sharing just became easy with smartphones. It’s now just part of my workflow.
I started ‘tweeting’ way back in 2007.
I have had over 90,000 tweets.
My best tweet (based on sharing and engagement metrics) came just this weekend:
God Bless America – Bed Bath and Beyond is bigger than the Greek Stock market and Shake Shack is bigger than the entire coal industry
— howardlindzon (@howardlindzon) July 4, 2015
Definitely not that sexy or interesting and no way I thought it would be my best ever. I am sure I could reverse engineer the tweet to see why it caught on, but that’s not my thing. I don’t care for a formula if its recreating stuff I just don’t think is that great. I would be bored. Twitter, Buzzfeed and Facebook seem to control that anyways.
In a cruel twist of irony though….Twitter wants me to pay them to promote by best tweet:
Twitter itself is likely struggling because I would never pay to promote this. If I need 80,000 impressions to get 19 followers….I might as well burn cash.
I share on Stocktwits, my blog, Instagram and Twitter for all the derivative value…and derivatives are very hard to value..ask Warren Buffett.
Great post, Howard. I will share with my wife, who asks me why I “overshare” (in her view).
Ironically, just ahead of this in my stream was someone posting “the best times to post on social media”. Yuck. If you’re planning for the best time to share, you’re doing it wrong.
thanks Barry
In regards to “reverse engineering” something and understanding why it goes viral, I have an odd story too. I wrote a post way back when titled “Kids Want to be Snipers”. It was in response to my reading a book called Microtrends….had nothing to actually do with snipers per se. It’s to this day my most read post (I blog about VC and startups) and almost all the traffic comes via Google. Somehow a lot of people are googling becoming a sniper. Will I change my approach to “sharing”…no! Could I probably drive tons of traffic and followers on social channels by writing about snipers more often…probably. :-)
interesting