I’ve always known intellectually that it’s easier to share links through social media, but I had no idea how quickly that would impact me.

Last night, we had some friends over and they had mentioned this article about how the app pricing model doesn’t work RPGs. Because I hadn’t been on Twitter or Facebook, I didn’t see the article.

Here’s where it got interesting for me.

In a typical day, I would have booted up Twitter or Facebook, looked it up on one of their profiles and then clicked over to the article. Since I made a pledge not to use those tools, now if I want the article I have to do one of three things: a) ask for someone to e-mail me the link b) type in the domain name of the article and manually look for it there or c) use natural search to find it.

I used natural search and found it pretty quickly, in part because the article was recently published and the domain had good SEO. For articles that haven’t been published in a while that are suddenly popular again? Well, that might get a little more time-consuming because it may not be apparent what the newest or the most popular pages on a website are. Plus, not every website has great SEO. There are some domains I’ve researched for professional reasons that didn’t even rank for their own brand name.

The other interesting thing about getting a link on Twitter or Facebook, is that I don’t need to rely on asking someone to share something with me that they think is cool. By following people I like, admire or want to learn from, I can see what they’re reading without ever developing a face-to-face connection. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s informative. Regardless, it’s a potpourri of information that points directly where I’d need to go, rather than house all that information on one website and ask me to take a second or third click.

Of course, with some of the advances in the web recently, I’m seeing more and more regular websites integrate with Facebook and Twitter. I’m not a hundred percent sure that’s such a good idea because even though those links come through social media, some of the business-related ones (e.g. products and whatnot) look really fake. I’m of the belief that not every website needs to integrate with social media, especially since it’s a cocktail party. In my experiences, social media works best when it’s “natural” as opposed to “engineered.”

Since I encountered a situation that not only affected me, but forced me to go around social media to find what I’m looking for, I can see the value in these tools is the ease-of-use because it facilitates rapid decision-making. Last week, I would have instinctively known it’s importance not simply based on the one link alone, but the volume of people that were talking, sharing, commenting and interacting with it. While I feel it’s too soon to know if I could recognize that now (e.g. there’s lots of conversations happening all the time about lots of links) the conversation I had isolated the news and not only made it more important to me…but I was more curious about it and wanted to listen because I hadn’t already talked about it to death. The conversation wasn’t a rehash of what happened online; it was new.

Wow, all that from a single link!


About 100 Days: From April 4th to July 13th I’m turning the lights off on Facebook, Twitter and IMs for personal use. Read 100 Days: Turning off the Lights on Social Media for more information. You can also read the 100 Days post archive.