cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by andrew_mc_d
I am going to have to admit it; the term “lurker” drives me nuts.
I know that there is an amount of time where someone is becoming comfortable with the idea of social media, but many have admitted to me that they just look at all the great resources yet are uncomfortable tweeting from their own account. My response to this is that they simply “retweet” some of the great content they are reading. You do not have to have original content or come up with the next “big thing” but simply just share.
Here is an example of how sharing and a simple retweet can create a ripple effect.
This morning (in Australia), I received a tweet from someone I don’t know.
Being the “cyber sleuth” that I am, before I responded, I checked out who they were and their tweets. I was not sure if it was a legitimate account or not since I did not recognize the name, although I recognized the #sd36learn hashtag that they used in their tweet. This process is something that I do for many tweeters that send me a message because there is definitely some spam out there. Here is what I found in their profile:
So…not many followers and not many tweets. Most would be thrown off by this but I was interested in what he had to share so I went through his tweets. Sure enough, I found this little gem:
So now, with his 26 tweets and his 15 followers, @MrAbdolall simply retweeted a great article that I will now be using as the basis of my “Digital Footprint” workshop (I am still in the process of creating it but feel free to use) that I will be doing in Adelaide, Australia on Wednesday. It really is that simple. As I tried to prepare for this workshop, there were so many good ideas that I wanted to talk about, but the Forbes article just made the information so nice and succinct, making it way easier to put together.
So my suggestion to new tweeters…
You may not have many followers and you may not be blogging or creating the next BIG IDEA, but what you share still matters. You never know the impact you can have by sharing a link or a blog post. Simply retweeting good information can help anyone, including someone like myself who has almost 40,000 tweets to his credit, continue to learn and grow.
Keep sharing. That’s it.
