For years now, it has been a commonality for social media sites to rate content and commentary on a sliding scale. Sites like YouTube and Yelp allow users to rate and review content on a five-point scale, while sites like StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed want to just know if you like it or not.

Scaled ratings

Historically, stars have represented a scale of ratings on popular sites such as YouTube. People give five stars to videos they love and a single star to videos they dislike. YouTube has now revealed how rare it is to receive feedback from anything in the middle. In a recent blog post, they shared recent studies that display the skewed findings. Below is a graph of which star ratings are the most popular:

As you can see, it is very rare for anyone to provide feedback in the middle. Apple’s App Store also faces a similar conundrum.

The five-point scale seems to be too restrictive and allows for little nuance while a percentage scaled, based out of 100, seems to be too large. Usually, scores almost never fall below 50%, because most people innately think of education scoring and its 90 = A, 80 = B scheme when using 100 percentage scales.

The the 10 point scale seems most ideal. It provides enough room to make important distinctions, but not so much room it throws off the accuracy of the scale. However, let’s explore boolean ratings a bit.

Boolean Ratings

A boolean rating is defined by a simple “yes/no” standard. Most social voting sites follow this standard. If you don’t like the content, you vote it down or bury it while thumbing up or voting content you do like. StumbleUpon and Digg.com have taken this a step further by trying to understand why you are voting down the content. They allow you to select if you are burying or thumbing down the content because it is spam, content you dislike, duplicate content, etc. This additional information gives their algorithms a better feel for why it wasn’t well received.

Judging by the behavior of most users on the five-point rating system, the natural conclusion would be to rid any scaled rating systems with boolean voting. This creates a problem for people not wanting to give a full thumbs up or vote for some minuscule reason. So maybe adding a way to vote in the middle, with a sideways thumb, half-vote, or something similar should solve all the world’s problems at that point, right?

Feedback What do you, as social media users, feel is a good metric for rating content?

In social news and social bookmarking sites, many users tend to get caught up in how many votes or bookmarks it will take for their submitted content to be promoted to the frontpage or “popular” sections of the site. What is often overlooked by users is the quality and naturalism of those votes that trigger the algorithms to promote that particular piece of content on individual social news and social bookmarking sites.

Seeking quality votes and bookmarks is comparable to seeking quality links in search engine optimization (SEO). A wise SEO will focus on the quality of links in the site’s link profile over the quantity of links. The key is building an image of trust to the eyes of the algorithm.

Often, social media users will be propositioned by other users on that network to vote or bookmark content they have submitted in attempt to promote that content to the frontpage. The original user will provide you a link to the voting page on the social media site, you vote, and then get back to your busy day. This is also known as a “blind vote” which defines a person blindly voting for particular content without viewing it. The issue in this scenario is that the vote you just gave to that content is not weighed very heavily and thus considered a low-quality vote.

With social media sites having their own framed bars for content now (e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon) they are able to measure the level of engagement on the actual content page. This opens up a whole new area for detecting naturalism within social media voting. Reasons why a vote might be considered unnatural or low-quality include:

• There is no click-through to view the content.
• There is little time spent on the page. (Average time expectations depend on type and length of content.)
• There is no engagement on the content page itself. (No scrolling, playing videos, clicking through slideshow, leaving comments, sharing, etc)

There is also the issue of how you arrived to the content. Coming straight to a voting page or an ‘upcoming’ page on a social media site, with no referring URL, likely means you came from a direct link via an IM or e-mail. While a shared URL isn’t a bad thing, it might be if the vast majority of your votes only come from that methodology. A way to gain a natural high-quality vote is to have the user start at the homepage of the site and perform actions to naturally find your content to vote on. That could be drilling down to the category or subcategory of your content and clicking on it, performing a site search for a keyword in your title, going to your profile and viewing your submitted content.

It’s important to note and keep in mind that if you are viewing a page that’s framed in a Digg bar and decide you want to thumb it from your StumbleUpon toolbar, you must first close out that Digg bar to get to the natural URL. At that point, the naturalism needs to begin all over again because StumbleUpon has just barely recognized you are viewing the content and doesn’t know you’ve previously been viewing it in another frame.

It’s not only pertinent to know how to receive natural votes, but there’s also a high level of importance in knowing how to give them. If you have a profile that’s always providing natural high-quality votes then your profile will tend to be trusted more when submitting your own content on that site. Avoiding any redflag that might indicate you partake in or organize manipulated voting for content can cause damage to your profile, and even the domains you might frequently submit.

Conclusion

Take it from someone who’s burned their fair share of social profiles in the past, that trying to get votes or give votes in a quick and easy fashion is not the best route to go when desiring long-term success with your profile and content promotion.

When you’ve spent a lot of time and money fine-tuning content, coming up with the best headline and description and sprucing up imagery and design, the last thing you want to do is promote content at an off-time when few people are listening.

A big challenge with social media is to break through the information overload that most people experience with updates and piles of content constantly flowing through their various communication channels. With such a high velocity of information flowing people are typically not spending much time going back to see what they’ve missed since they last visited. If your content isn’t near the top of the pile when someone logs into a social news site, there’s a high chance they won’t look back far enough to find it.

So knowing when your target audiences are most likely to be viewing, and hence when best to send out messages or content such as social news submissions, Tweet, or Facebook updates, is important to ensure that your messages and content are actually going to be seen by the masses.

The question’s been asked time and time again regarding the best time to submit content to Digg or Reddit to ensure optimal exposure. While it was once speculated that submissions late at night (low-activity hours) had less competition with articles and therefore had a greater chance of being promoted to the front page overnight, it is now anyone’s guess whether that is true. It seems lately that the threshold of a front page promotion remains somewhat the same regardless of the time of day.

There are pros and cons of submitting content to social news sites during high-activity hours versus low-activity hours.

High-activity hour submissions: pros

• More votes
• More visitors
• More comments and engagement

High-activity hour submissions: cons

• Content gets filtered out of “new” or “upcoming” sections more quickly
• Visitor bounce rate may be higher due to content noise
• Engagement may be lower due to content noise

Low-activity hour submissions: pros

• Less noise
• More face-time on the “upcoming” or “new” sections.
• Easier front page promotion (speculative)

Low-activity hour submissions: cons

• Fewer visitors
• Fewer votes
• Greater foreign audience (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it depends on what the content is)
• Less comments and engagement

If you want to submit during high-activity hours then note that the majority of Digg users are in the U.S. and the best hours of exposure are under U.S. time. Most users tune in to social news sites during business hours which is usually 8:00 A.M to 5:00 P.M, and it’s good to go with the mean by using Central Standard Time (CST), submitting content around 7:00 P.M. – 8:00 P.M. so that it will be 6:00 A.M. – 7:00 A.M. in the west and 8:00 A.M. – 9:00 A.M. in the east. This way you will get the most exposure for your content.

When content is promoted to the front page in non-US business hours it is capturing a lot of viewers globally that are currently in high-activity hours themselves. While it is good to capture an international audience the content misses the highest amount of traffic it can potentially have.

Front page promotion timing

Submission exposure is only one half of the equation while front page exposure is the other half. Content may have a low-level of engagement overnight but if it is promoted to the front page overnight then the content is likely to be well-positioned during high-activity hours of the morning the next day. Conversely, this is when a lot of content is being promoted to the front page so the face-time on the front page is shortened by a high level of noise.

Content can be promoted to the front page at any time from approximately an hour after submission to 24 hours after submission. While the timing of the front page promotion is contingent upon the social news site’s algorithm and the qualitative voting data, the quantitative voting data can play a large role too.

For example, after a story is promoted to the front page on Digg it has a limited time to obtain a large amount of votes, to be one of the most Dugg stories, and make it to the “Top in All Topics” section on the right column. The “Top in All Topics” area allows the content to continue to get exposure for a longer period of time. If content front pages early after the submission then it must scramble to obtain enough Diggs to the most exposure before it becomes a victim of pagination. This is sometimes the downfall of breaking news stories that are promoted quickly and don’t get enough Diggs in time.

That said, sometimes it’s better to front page later in the day with a higher amount of votes to aim for the Top in All section. But if the content isn’t the best of the best, and doesn’t deserve to be there, it likely won’t. In that instance, you are luckier if your content is promoted to the front page in the A.M. hours.

While you have little control over your front page promotion timing you have full control over your submission timing. There are usually different scenarios for different types of content being submitted.

If you want to share a great piece of information or resource over Twitter or Facebook updates consider what time of day you submit it. Weigh out noise vs lower activity to make the best decision on when to shout your message.

As a resource, check out SocialBlade to see how users are behaving at Digg.com. You can view daily, weekly, and monthly trends and activity levels. This can be very helpful in deciding when to submit and promote content.

Social shopping relays an e-commerce method of traditional shopping in which consumers shop in a social networking type of environment. Social shopping sites reflect users’ personal tastes and allow for online conversation. Visitors can learn what’s popular, get shopping ideas, and follow links to products they wouldn’t necessarily find on their own.

Using the wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends. Others concentrate on the user interactions and recommendations based upon peer-to-peer social relationships and credible users. While Web 2.0 is slowly morphing new direction, social shopping is still trying to hit mainstream. Compared to many Web 2.0 sites, social shopping sites are slowly growing but still growing hand over fist.

Social shopping combines two of the Web’s most prominent activities: engaging in commerce and chatting with like-minded folks. The sites don’t directly sell things, but encourage users to share links to:

• Hot products
• Good finds
• Weird finds
• Quality products
• Products to avoid

Internet marketing with social shopping

The rise of social shopping provides Internet marketers with even more opportunities and challenges, online. This many-to-many form of word-of-mouth marketing offers a wealth of opportunities for Internet marketers with limited client budgets to work on. This also creates a great opportunity for online retailers to engage in some low-cost, word-of-mouth marketing.

Internet marketers need to take heed of the many facets of marketing with social shopping. These elements include:

Credibility

Product recommendations that come from social users with credibility may be more trusted. Therefore,  site visitors may return more often and be more likely to spread the good word and purchase the products they learn about on the sites.

Marketing Opportunity: Start building up your own social shopping accounts to learn the sites in and out. Then, start contributing to the community and building a fan-base for yourself, thus giving you credibility. Once a network of followers or friends is built you can lean on them to help promote and review your products.

Utility

Users have many tools at their disposal for sharing and collaborating products. Browser bookmarklets, widgets, wishlists, profiles, buzz measuring features, and more help users interface with one another.

Marketing Opportunity: These tools allow marketers to analyze the current sentiment and interest around brands and products. Utilize these features for market and user research.

Sales

By its nature, social shopping is more likely to impact brand awareness, purchase consideration and intent, but not necessarily direct sales as much as one might expect. The ROI is likely not fully there quite yet until social shopping hits the mainstream.

Marketing  Opportunity: Some social shopping sites offer the unique opportunity for brands to connect with their audiences by integrating with and/or creating shopping communities often with direct communication capabilities within the network.

Get your e-commerce clients involved in social shopping now while it is early enough to become a maven in the communities, promote with ease, and be heard. Once you establish yourself and clients’ in a community early on, this opens many doors of further opportunity down the road.

Social shopping sites to get started with

Right now, Kaboodle.com takes the cake as far as having the largest community, most unique visitors, and friendliest UI. Here’s a full list for you to start with though:

• Kaboodle
• StyleHive
• ThisNext
• CrowdStorm
• Wists
• Shoppero
• StyleFeeder
• StuffPit
• NaturalBornShopper
• Storrz
• Zixxo
• DealBundle
• FiveLimes
• MyPickList
• TribeSmart
• Woot
• RedFlagDeals
• RedTagCrazy
• Zebo
• ShopStyle
• MyItThings
• ShopTogether
• ProductWiki
• ILikeTotallyLoveIt
• Wishpot
• Shopflick
• Fluid
• DesignSociety
• ReallyWantThat
• JustBoughtIt
• Fruugo
• Select2gether
• Veedow
• GoToDaily
• Like
• ShopFiber
• Etsy
• Glimpse
• Hawkee
• Osoyou
• ReesyCakes
• Yub
• WhatsBuzzing
• Desiresin
• TheFind
• WishRoll
• USuggest
• Shopr.com

Marketers will be interested in a brief look at compiled demographic data for social shopping and review sites compiled from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast thanks to SocialMediaTrader.com:

Proceed to checkout

The Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) should take a close look at social shopping and consider an integration of the two. As the people’s voice continues to grow louder and louder online, the synergistic approach of combining CSEs and the e-commerce experience with social shopping could but the biggest key element in the future for online shopping.

Since their infancy, social news sites have been trying to stay one step ahead of social media users trying to artificially promote content to their front page. Digg.com has been the center focus for spamming and gaming in social media because a front-page promoted story equates to thousands of visitors and hundreds, or even thousands of links. In order to combat the gamers and filter out spam, Digg has created an algorithm that is very complex in nature. Never do they cease to fine tune it, in an effort to try to stay ahead of people trying to artificially promote content to their front page.

Social voting: then

Social news sites rely on the community to downvote or bury spammy content, and while the community does a good job, it’s not always enough to keep an organized promotion effort from succeeding. Traditionally, organized social community members have voted on each others’ content to get enough votes to promote to the front page. While there are measures in place to prevent organized efforts, like enforced Terms of Service rules, natural behavior recognition, reciprocal voting pattern observation, etc., it hasn’t been enough. Thus, social media sites have looked for another solution to help them with their epidemic.

Users heavily involved in social media are constantly being pinged all day long from other users in solicitation for a vote on the content they are trying to promote. Frequently, social media users “blind vote” without even viewing the content. Social news sites caught on and established a behavioral metric of content click through to make the vote weight heavier towards the promotion of that content. Social users then just started clicking through and leaving quickly before they voted.

Social voting: now

Recently, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit have all released options for their users to shorten their URLs to share with their friends. These shortened URLs frame the content below a bar at the top of the page. The bars allow users to vote on the content and explore related content if desired.

StumbleUpon’s Su.pr URL shortened bar

Reddit’s short URL bar

Reddit’s FireFox Socialite bar

Digg’s URL shortened bar

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think there’s a deeper reason StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Digg have all recently released URL shorteners and framed bars for their content. We now are approaching a new era in the world of social voting and organized promotion. An era of measuring user engagement on content to analyze natural behavior in order to determine if the vote for that content, from the social media user, is genuine or artificial.

Framed content allows social news sites to move beyond the click-through to measure behavioral metrics.  Now social news sites can analyze:

• How long a user was on the site
• If the user scrolled below the fold
• If the user interacted with media objects like Flash or video
• What the average time spent on the site was
• If the content intrigued the user to explore further within the site
• What the user clicks on, copies, bookmarks, prints, etc.
• How many visitors came to the URL and didn’t vote

This opens up gaming to a whole new level. Now social users need to have their voter rings either engage more heavily in their content or emulate fake user-behavior. This is a new level of cat and mouse that gamers will be playing with social news sites. Personally, I always engage in the content, and no longer blind vote, to prevent my social profiles to be viewed as natural and not part of a voting “favor” ring.

For the social communities, this is a great step in the right direction. The analytics should help filter out a lot of the garbage that enters the frontpage of many social media sites. Time will tell how if social news sites are actually analyzing and utilizing this data correctly in their benefit.

Your sites are being framed

As of now, the Diggbar shows only to those Digg users that are signed in and haven’t opted out of the Diggbar. I’m sure if Digg had it their way everyone would use the framed content. However, they caught a lot of flack from webmasters for doing so. There are some fundamental issues with these frames that have upset webmasters. Social frames:

• Prevent canonical URL bookmarking
• Prevent canonical URL sharing
• Prevent cross-pollination on social sites (for example, you can’t Stumble the canonical URL upon visiting a framed Digg URL)

There is a solution. Add this code to the top of your pages or install this Wordpress plugin. However, some webmasters are happy because there are benefits from shorteners like Su.pr. Su.pr, by StumbleUpon, allows statistical analytics of your users and encourages them to checkout other popular content on your site. Ultimately, it’s up to you which route you want to take.

Recently, Greg Finn at 10e20.com covered Will Digg Be a Better Place Without Shouts? In the post, Greg announces the news of Digg dropping their shout system, which allowed Digg users to share content with each other, in lieu of a feature that allows users to share content via email, Facebook, and Twitter. So, the main concern now is how Digg content will infiltrate (and pollute) Twitter from this point forward.

Image courtesy of ReadWriteWeb.com

There is already so much noise on Twitter that it becomes difficult to monitor the majority of the conversation without integrated segmentation tools. Twitter can be a great place to find resourceful content and to share links with friends but when does it become too much? The previous shout feature on Digg was already very noisy for users which irritated many Diggers. Many predict those complaints will now become those of Twitter users.

“I’m not big on how they’re [Digg] bringing all the noise to Twitter. I think that’s gonna backfire on Digg and people are going to get so tired of all the people shouting stuff around on Twitter. Many users will unfollow everybody doing it similar to how people reacted negatively to the shouts when those first started.” – Jeff Flowers a.k.a. Bukowsky

Of course there’s always the option of not refusing to pollute Twitter and Facebook with links, or doing so only in moderation. And there’s always the option of unfollowing frequent Digg shouters on Twitter.

“I don’t plan on using Twitter to promote my Digg stories anytime soon. It was easier to monitor shouts because they were coming from mutual friends who I knew submitted good content. On Twitter, I could easily see it just becoming a tidal wave of incoming Digg links that I’d have no way of sifting through.” – Henry Hill a.k.a. BadwithComputer

Digg claims that they removed the shout system because the Digg team “listened to your feedback, crunched some user data, and decided to remove shouts. As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options.” Now the question is: will they listen to the community again? This time the community is much larger because it includes Twitter and Facebook users.

“I think what Digg is doing is not only unfair to the community but also unfair to the Twitter community. Not only is there no way for Digg users to communicate with each other on the site (i.e. sitemail) but now all the spam and junk people were pushing on Digg is going to be pushed via Twitter. You can already see dozens and dozens of stories being “shouted” on Twitter. Similarly now I’m getting dozens of requests a day from people asking to retweet their stories (rather than shout). Same problem, different platform.”  – Muhammad Saleem

However, there are others who had different feelings on the situation.

“I think people were already Twittering Digg links well before the removal of shouts. The good thing about Twitter is that it is a choice who you follow and who you ignore, so each person will learn how much they can flood their stream with crap before they lose followers.

I was actually present when they introduced shouts in testing and told them I thought it was a bad idea as most users would use it to spam their submits. I am happy they removed it as Twitter and Facebook shares do not effect the actual volume of voting on Digg as much as shouts did.” – Brent Csutoras

“For me personally – I don’t really use the shouts that much. It is on a rare occasion and I find that they actually make it harder to get something on the front page. So in that respects – I don’t care too much. I tend to share stuff on Twitter anyways – so that is cool. In the end, I think the shift won’t change much. There will still be diggers who make up the majority of the content and there will still be other folks who are angry about it.”  – David Cohn

With any new change to a social media platform comes complaints. Some social media users will revolt, others will remain indifferent, and the complainers will eventually learn to adapt to the change. But if the majority of people are upset, change can and will modify the current situation.

What are infographics?

Infographics, or information graphics, are visual devices that communicate information or data in an easily digestible manner. They have been used for ages by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of communicating conceptual information, support it, strengthen it and present it within a provoking and sensitive context. Since infographics are image-based they usually contain very little text. Images speak a thousand words especially when images are used together to visualize an architecture of information.

Infographics and their influence in Social Media

With so much content being published on the Internet daily, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be able to check out all the cool things you want to and still have time to get any work done during the day. When it comes to social media users, you tend to have a very short attention span with them to begin with.

If your content isn’t visually appealing and neatly organized, you have a reduced chance of gaining a vote or bookmark from a social media user. Usually social media users will be off to the next piece of content they find interesting if your content doesn’t hook them right away. This is why infographics have played an increasingly important role in social news and bookmarking.

Infographics are very powerful in the regard that they can make dull data or information more interesting with visual appeal. This is important in capturing a user’s immediate attention and directing their eyes through a visual flow of information in a timely fashion.

In my observations, infographics have higher chance of becoming viral and being shared with friends online. It seems the aesthetic appeal and uniqueness of infographics are appreciated by users, and in turn, they reward the content with links, votes, bookmarks, and sharing.

Examples of good infographics

Mint.com’s blog does an excellent job in visualizing financial data. Their latest infographic, China vs United States: A Visual Comparison, received almost 3,000 Diggs and huge penetration in StumbleUpon. Had this been a textual article, it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t have had near the penetration. For Mint.com, infographics have been the key to success for massive amounts of traffic and links.

Another recent hit by Westwood College:

And some more examples of good infographics

Infovideos?

Alternatively, you can even take infographics a step further and animate them into a video format. This allows you to have further penetration on social video sharing Websites as well. The downside is it takes longer to portray all the information you want to share to users so you may have a higher bounce rate. See an example below:

Where to begin?

When you’re writing your next article or piece of content that you feel may be somewhat dry or could be visualized easier then it might be a good idea to go ahead and give infographics a shot. Illustration skills are required but being a master of illustration is not important. The best route to go would be to research your data and document it, wireframe a layout of information and form, and hand it off to a designer to visualize it. Work hand-in-hand with them to make sure the element of communication the data is properly being implemented.

You’ve heard it before, “Content is king”, but is it really? When it comes to promoting content in social media, content is not what’s solely going to drive popularity to your campaign. Content is still a very important factor, especially if you are using a resource hook to drive traffic and links.

I’ll wait for future posts to dive into all the factors that drive popularity to your content through social media promotion but today I am going to cover an important element, social proof.

Wikipedia defines social proof as:

“Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior.“

Naturally, humans look for external cues or indicators of influence when they are making decisions regarding consumption, time, attention, and engagement. With the Web constantly inundating users with a steady flow of information, it’s even more apparent that users rely heavily on indicators of social proof and wisdom of the crowds.

A mass quantity of people adopting, consuming, and/or contributing to a single entity subconsciously gives a lot of unspoken credibility to that entity. This is where social media comes in. People instinctively look for the acceptance of others as proof that the content is viable or the consumption is worth their time.

When you are promoting a piece of content in social media on sites like Digg.com or Reddit.com there are ways to create cues as social proof that your content should be worth checking out. A piece of content looks pretty lonely on the “new” or “upcoming” pages with no votes or comments on it. People are most likely to pay more attention to the content that a large amount of people have engaged with either by voting or commenting. You can create visual cues by creating and initiating a conversation and having users vote up your content. These cues draw eyes, entice engagement, and increase the chances of natural promotion.

Another element of social proof is any traffic or engagement indicators on the actual content itself. These traffic indicators can include:

• Displayed number of RSS subscribers
• Displayed number of visits to the content
• Comments on the content
• Votes on social media sites as displayed by buttons/widgets
• Alexa/Compete/Quantcast high traffic indications on the domain

Digg has made their algorithm such that if you get votes from friends that regularly vote on your content, then their votes count much less than a person who does not regularly vote on your content. A large amount of votes from people who don’t regularly vote on your content decreases the threshold for your content to be promoted to the front page. So if friends’ votes don’t count as much, then why bother?

The answer is social proof. If you get friends to vote up your content or comment on your submission, then other, non-friends are far more likely to naturally see that content and be more enticed to vote for it themselves.

Be cautious in the manner you go about creating a conversation or voting, though. Anything forced or done with the suspicious intent of manipulating social proof is likely to be called out and therefore will work against you. The key is to do it in a natural manner. A newly submitted piece of content that’s only been in the “new” or “upcoming” section for a few minutes shouldn’t have 75 votes, as it may look unnatural at that point – unless it’s extremely breaking news.

A social media submission with a bunch of unnatural comments like “cool article” or “nice post” just for the sake of having a small or large quantity of comments on there also looks highly unnatural. Any unnatural behavior is asking for a downvote or bury, because users feel deceived at that point. If you draw users in and they see you’ve done so by gaming the system, then you can have great content but they’ll still be upset enough to bury your content at that point.

Here is some great advice from a social media post by Brian Clark:

” … given the way social proof drives social media, the way you frame your initial message is critical. You want the momentum of social proof aligned with where you want to go, not with where things are.”

And with that, I’ll leave you with tip to start off a conversation as an element of social proof, in your social media submission. Pose a question either in the title or description of your submission. The more controversial the question you pose, the more engagement you’ll have. Keep in mind, however, it is not recommended to be the first to comment on your submission or pose a question to get the ball rolling. Many social media users are (typically) unhappy when you are the first to comment on your own submission.

While you can help steer a message, you can’t completely control it – so be prepared and have backup plans for negative sentiment and repercussions.