Too Much Sharing Going On – A Case Study

I share an office with my wife and as I was heading out for a meeting, I noticed she was tagging something in Diigo, a social bookmarking site which allows you to store articles with descriptions and tags for later retrieval. I inquired why she was still using Diigo, and not Evernote to keep track of all things important. “I never learned to use Evernote,” she replied. Simple enough reason.
This got me thinking about why we use certain tools to accomplish our on-line tasks. Be it Diigo instead of Evernote or TweetDeck instead of Hootsuite, what makes a person choose one tool over another? Why do people not always choose the more highly rated or more efficient tool for the job?
Very often it comes down to time and effort. My wife uses Diigo and TweetDeck because she doesn’t have time to learn a new tool, and TweetDeck got there first. It’s the tool that, today, requires no extra learning. After all, social media isn’t her business. While she’s using it for business, if one tool does the job, why look at another?
One of the things that we social media people have a hard time understanding is that not everybody embraces the available tools for connecting with the zeal that our community does. When I probed my wife’s social media habits further and inquired whether she shared the articles she saved to Diigo, she said no. No? “Why,” I asked her and her answer surprised me more than I expected. Very calmly she replied, “There is too much sharing going on.”
Really??? Too much sharing?
She went on to explain that her business Diigo group only had a few followers, and that her intention was to reach a wider audience. That is why she shares to Twitter and Facebook, and not to LinkedIn. There was no real purpose to sharing to her Diigo group. In her mind, it was more efficient to send an email newsletter summarizing her favorites.
So, have we reached a limit to the amount of sharing we are going to tolerate? After all, for small businesses, they can share to several social networks, including:

(check out the Big List of Social Bookmarking and Networking Sites on Squidoo)

So, how much is too much? As you saw from the conversation with my wife, too much is going beyond Facebook and Twitter. But, maybe your target audience is also on LinkedIn. Then you have no choice but to be available there, as well.
The moral to the story is simple – share where you reach your audience. Because, after all, you can’t share everything everywhere. It’s just not possible.
Where are you sharing? Where have you been most effective?
Social Bookmarking Sites explained: Social bookmarking sites allow users to organize, manage and store any resources that they discover on-line. It is like an on-line filing cabinet for everything internet. They do work very similar to Evernote, in that you add websites to your account, and can tag them with keywords and descriptions, which are then searchable. Evernote has an advantage, in that you can send items from your e-mail, desktop computer, smartphone, or tablet.
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