I’m thinking that I need to optimize my social network sharing strategy. Ideally, I’d like to reach the maximum number of people with the minimum effort and I think that I may have too many channels. There is also some duplication that I want to eliminate.
To achieve my aims, I think that I first need to analyze my sharing habits and who sees what I share. This might take several posts to untangle.
Typically, I’ll read an article that I like and I’ll hit the “share” or the “share with comment” button. Items that I mark this way are immediately available in [Chris’s Shared Item](http://www.google.co.uk/reader/shared/12981735514196780717?hl=en) page. They also automatically go to my 27 followers (most of whom I do not know!) and, I believe, to my Buzz network. In Buzz, I am following the same people I follow in GReader so I think that Buzz followers must automatically be people you follow in GReader. As I have only 7 followers in Buzz, but they appear in the list of my 27 GReader followers I assume that Buzz followers are a proper subset of my GReader followers.
In my feeds, I also get a group of articles from blogs that I follow using the Blogger FriendConnect widget. These folks seem to be in a completely separate social network and would have to follow this blog to see my posts. Unless they actually take the trouble to visit my [public Google profile](http://www.google.com/profiles/114765763466148616187?hl=en) and follow my public [GReader Atom sharing](http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F12981735514196780717%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast) link, they are probably unaware that they’re part of my network and won’t see any promotion of their stuff that I might share via GReader.
(In fact it’s an interesting question, why, if Google wants to have a social network like Facebook, they have so many seemingly disconnected silos.)
From this analysis, it would seem that sharing via GReader is not particularly effective: I have 17 followers, 5 of whom I know and follow back.
That said, one presumes that people follow me on GReader because they want to read what I share. I’ve certainly picked up things earlier from my small GReader network than I would from Twitter. For example, this week’s Google Wave story broke from one of the people I’m following in GReader earlier than it did from the “official” media.
**Widening My Reach with FriendFeed**
**Doing Better with Send To**
– Send to Blog
– Send to Twitter
– Send to Facebook
– Send to Posterous
– Send to Delicious.