How to Royally Screw Up Your Social Sharing Numbers

It takes a big person to admit making a social media publishing mistake.

However, I will share a way to successfully screw up your social media sharing numbers, if you’re so inclined to learn this skill.

START HERE

I decided to change my URL title structure to make it shorter and more SEO-effective. It was pretty long and included the domain name/date/category/number/ title.

 SUCCESSFUL SCREW-UPS MADE EASY

WordPress offers an easy way to customize the URL in the Settings section under Permalinks.  Below are the the common settings.

http://www.writingriffs.com/?p=123
http://www.writingriffs.com/2012/07/19/sample-post/
http://www.writingriffs.com/2012/07/sample-post/
http://www.writingriffs.com/archives/123
http://www.writingriffs.com/sample-post/

DO THIS NEXT

I decided to change mine to simply to the domain name and title of the post. Example – www.writingriffs.com/title

VOILA – YOU DID IT!

It worked beautifully. Simplied, shortened and made the URL structure more SEO-friendly.

LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

However, I did not take into account the social sharing numbers that had built up and were attached to each post. I use the Really Simple Share plugin app to make sharing as easy as possible. It keeps track of all the shares and displays the numbers. When I made the permalink structure change it reset all the social numbers to zero.

Zero.

For example, the article “Storytelling Story-Selling Secret Sources,” had over 500 shares. it went to zero. And Open Your World, Walk Towards Wisdom- An Interview with Dr. Ken Blanchard had 231 shares on Twitter. It went to zero.  As did all other articles.

Did that affect me?

Of course not.

I mean it only wiped out a couple years worth of data.

So, if you want to be succcessful at wiping out your social sharing numbers, just change your URL permalionk structure.

Instant success.

Guaranteed.

Social Media from 1969 to 2013: What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been – INFOGRAPHIC

Social Media from 1969 to 2013: What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been – INFOGRAPHIC

Even the Grateful Dead Would Call This a Strange Trip

I just ran across the Social Media History infographic by Cendrine Marrouat (@cendrinemedia) and  Karim Benyagoub (@karim_designs) below. It gives a fairly detailed timeline that highlights not only the speed of change of human communications – but the transmogrifying type of change.

Social Media Didn’t Start in 2003 – Who’d Thunk?

For the most part, to me, it seems that social media started blossoming into the public awareness around the 2003-2006 period with the founding of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, and WordPress. But …

Can You Imagine a World Without

  • Email (besides heaven)? That was the world in 1970. The first email was sent in 1971.
  • Blogs or bloggers? That’d be 1992. The first blog launched in 1993.
  •  A public internet? That’d be 1990. The world wide web went public in 1991.
  • Google? That’d be 1997. Google was founded in 1998.
  • Facebook selfies? That’d be 2003. Facebook started in 2004.
  • Goofy YouTube videos? That’d be 2004. YouTube started in 2005.
  • Tweets or Twits? That’d be 2005. Twitter started tweeting in 2006.

So What’s Next?

What is somebody working on right now that will revolutionize the way we create, share, find or consume content and new ideas? My bet is it will involve wearable and semantic web appstransmedia, and what Ray Kurzweil calls The Singularity… but what do you think?

Thanks to Cendrine Marrouat (@cendrinemedia on Twitter)‏ of Creative Ramblings for this infographic.  

Social Media - A History

Link to original infographic –  http://www.creativeramblings.com/social-media-history-infographic-updated/
Awesome feature photo above by my favorite artist, H.Kopp Delaneyhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/