To Link or not to Link, this is my question. 9/6/09

I'm getting a picture of the whole internet world standing side by side, arms intertwined, swaying to the music and singing "We are Family." Everywhere I go online, I'm offered the option to link. You've probably figured out by now that I'm not a big risk taker and one of my biggest fears is, I will choose an option, regret it, and not remember where to go to unchoose it. On the other hand I can see the beauty of all these links that automatically perform functions that could be a full-time job for a person.

Everyone agrees that if someone makes the choice to follow you, it's only proper and polite to send them a direct message and thank them for the follow. Well, that seems reasonable and I've done it faithfully. But there's a place called http://www.socialoomph.com/ that you can join, for free, and they will automatically send your personalized message to each person that adds you to their follow list. Now I ask you, how cool is that! I've gotten as many as 5 new followers in a day, this will save me lots of time.

So I've signed up and written my "Thank you for following me messages." Yes, I said messages, because you can write multiple messages and they will rotate them for you, so not everyone gets the same Thank You message. I mean, just imagine how impersonal it would seem if two peeps that followed you, from somewhere in the world, compared notes and realized you had sent them both the same message! This is a wonderful feature and now I have more time to be thinking up clever things to Tweet.

I've noticed a pattern in the Tweets I receive from the tweeters I'm following... very few of them ever say anything real. Mostly it's just advertisements; go to my site, look at me, look at my stuff, buy my stuff, read my stuff, rate my stuff. But there are a few that actually say things, such as... what they are doing, or what they like and don't like. Those are the ones I notice when scrolling through. So I've made it my goal to say only real things in my tweets. I don't believe it matters to anyone else, but it matters to me.

I'm told you should only advertise one out of every 10 posts, that's easy for me since I'm not selling anything. Every so often I will direct someone to this blog or to my website, but other than that I just try and say stuff that I'm thinking about, something cheerful and encouraging.

Another reason for my choice to say only real things is I've chosen to link my Facebook page to my Twitter page, (also done through SocialOomph) so everything I post on Twitter automatically goes to my Plaxo page and my Facebook page. I haven't figured out if this is a good feature or not yet. We'll see if my Facebook friends, (mostly friends and family) start taking me off their facebook pages because they just aren't interested in what I'm thinking at the moment. Personally, I think they should indulge me, after all I keep them in my Facebook even though they rarely say anything real. I do however know what color they would be if they were a color, what disney character they are and how their farms and gardens are doing.

Well, that's about it for today. It's the weekend, I do need to give my brain a much needed rest. I continue to slowly gather followers. I can boast that there are 72 peeps in my social network now. You may laugh, but that number seems quite overwhelming to someone that felt very popular with 8. I even have a foreign follower, I can't understand anything he/she says, I don't even know what language it's in... but they are a part of my world and I love them just the same. "We are family...."