Seek to listen before you share in blogging and social media

I intended to share word of Buffer’s “Suggestions” feature in my post today. But a funny thing happened when I went to Buffer’s site for an explanation of “Suggestions.” I was notified that the feature was being eliminated come August 1.

As way of background, Buffer is an application widely used to spread out the timing of your contributions to social media.

I use Buffer everyday so that I can I read articles from my news aggregator a couple times a day and share multiple pieces each time via Twitter. With Buffer, my Tweets are spread out over a period of time which I define.

“Suggestions” is a feature that suggests articles and blog posts to read and share. I was starting to enjoy using the feature as much of the suggested content was relevant to technology, design, social media, and entrepreneurship, items dear to my heat.

Buffer shuttered “Suggestions” in large part because the feature prioritized sharing content over consuming content.

By making it so easy to share Suggestions, we haven’t spent as much time encouraging listening as we should have.

One of Buffer’s core values is “Listen first: You focus on listening rather than responding.” Suggestions prioritized sharing content over consuming content.

Buffer’s placard on listening is a nice message to all of us. In this day of social networks a pleanty and our desire to grab attention, there’s a tendency to over share.

Do we listen enough online? Do we seek to engage via blogging and other social media? Or are we sharing for sharing? Sharing for attention?

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I share a lot of items. I read a lot and share those items I think helpful or interesting to my followers.

My goal is to be a resource, a bit of an intelligence agent to people on the niches I work in and stay abreast of. The byproduct of which is I learn from reading and meet people I engage.

Strange thing is that though I was enjoying “Suggestions” now and then, I was feeling a bit guilty using it. Though some of the pieces were worth sharing (I read them) I kind of felt I was using the feature as a crutch to keep sharing.

Without “Suggestions,” I can get back to more authentic listening via my reading and sharing those items I have really sought out and digested. This is probably a better way of conducting myself when blogging and using social media.

Social media after all is a all about genuine and authentic conversation and engagement. Listening is not only prerequisite, but is more important than sharing.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Cristine Maybourne