Expand your reading base & your social network

If you visit the same accounts on social media over and over again and retweet only from those sources, your social media profile will get stale. Your followers want to see new content from new sources. Sure, your old and steady might offer generally interesting and relevant articles, but you need to spice it up a bit. Additionally, if you only read from the same sources, your frame of reference will become very limited.

Challenges to social media diversity
I use many social media channels and have done well on several of my handles. However, the battle has not been easy. My favorite social media channel is Twitter because it offers immediate results and can be grown very quickly if you have the right skills. To get a huge following, you have to follow and unfollow several thousand accounts per week. The problem with this is that your inbox will get filled with junk. There is no way to screen all of the people you follow except by scanning over their profile wording to see if they have any relevant keywords such as “marketing” or a business name (both of which create desirable followers for my main account on Twitter.)

Filtering my inbox
Every day, I spend a minute or two in my Twitter inbox unfollowing people who tweet boring content. I want to see content that I might want to read or retweet, otherwise you get canned! This process doesn’t take that long if you do it daily, but the result is excellent. I am now able to find a high percentage of quality articles and great photos in my inbox, and I get over a hundred new ones every minute! You snooze you lose! I normally retweet business and marketing articles from Inc., MarketingProfs, Entrepreneur, and other well known names. But, sometimes I get some very unusual and interesting content in my inbox which I have shared and gotten many favorites on. To get this type of successful diversity takes work, but the work pays off!

Other ways to diversify your reading
Many of the blogs with a smaller audience have weak materials. But, sometimes you can get some unusual point of view by browsing around. Additionally, by looking up keywords on Twitter, you can find accounts you don’t normally read, or unheard of people with viral content in your interest range. That is the perfect opportunity to read some content from new sources which might not only be new, but might be popular as well.

Your social network
Forget about social media and lets focus on live socializing. Most of us tend to talk to the same people over and over again. Ideas are stale and conversations can be like a broken record player. If we branch out, we normally talk to the same types of people we are comfortable. But, to grow as a person, you need to talk to people you don’t normally talk to. So, why not talk to some strangers at a comedy club, a bar, or on the bus? Why not exchange ideas with them? Normally they will be very boring (if they live in Los Angeles) but, you will eventually meet someone with some wacky ideas that will help you be a more broadminded person. If you meet a lot of people and exchange a lot of ideas that will help you be a blog writer or innovator. But, the two are really the same as a blog writer has to innovate ideas and strategies for making their blog popular!

What can you do?
Use the keyword search on Twitter and other social media platforms. Filter your inbox and read what the “smaller” bloggers are saying. Try some new and related keywords that you researched too. That way you can expand your interest. And if all else fails, try allsup.com and see what Guy Kawasaki recommends!

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