I was one of many who joined in with ProBlogger’s recent “Social Media Love-in”. In case you missed it, Darren from ProBlogger started all of this off with a post sharing his social media links and encouraging others to do the same. He called a halt to it after 24 hours, which was probably a wise decision, and then compiled a list of everyone who had responded, grouped by the 4 most popular social media sites as defined by those who left their details. Head over to ProBlogger to read the original post.
This resulted in a frenzy of activity by myself and a good few thousand others, I would imagine, adding everyone to their list that looked like they would be of interest and generally telling each other how great it all was. Now the dust has settled a little, I’ve had a chance to reflect. I concentrated on Twitter, Plurk and Stumbleupon. Although Digg was included in Darren’s list, I just haven’t had the time to go through it yet.
Stumbleupon
I didn’t get too far with this one, as I quickly reached a limit that I didn’t even know existed - you can only have 200 friends on Stumbleupon, and I already had about 190. I had no idea there was this limit and was more than a little surprised to find it.
Twitter
I’ve gained around 250 additional Followers on Twitter. There are some really interesting and friendly Twitters out there and hopefully I’ll be keeping in touch with a great many of them. After the initial flurry of “Isn’t this Love In great” tweets, things have slowed down a little now, which is no bad thing, as it was getting a little overwhelming.
Plurk
This was the real eye-opener for me. The Plurk list was much smaller, containing of around 150 people, compared to around 550 for Twitter and I’ve now got around 120 Plurk friends. The interesting part was realising just how interactive Plurk is. On Twitter, I find that I can post a Tweet and I’ll get absolutely no response most of the time. However, I can make the same post on Plurk, and I’ll almost always get at least 1 response. The downside, if you can call it that, is that I’ve found you have to spend a lot of time with Plurk to get the most out of it. It’s really easy to miss a response amongst all the other responses.
Conclusion
So, was it all worth it? Definititely yes! I’ve got a whole bunch of new friends and it was a fun experience. Here’s a few closing thoughts:
- I wasn’t impressed with the 200 friend limit on Stumbleupon
- There’s a lot of “noise” on Twitter - people really do spurt out a lot of random stuff. Although you get some of this on Plurk, people seem to consider their Plurks more before posting them
- I don’t personally get a lot of responses on Twitter, but then maybe I need to work on my Tweets!
- Plurk is really good fun
- I can easily see how people get totally addicted to social media sites. I’ve had to consciously restrict my use of them, otherwise I could quite easily spend 24 hours a day on them
There’s no closing date for any of this and ProBlogger’s list is still live, so it’s not too late to join in. If you want to add me to your lists, see my
About page.
