Links vs Shares on Social Media
One of the main reasons the Internet is so fascinating for people who study networks is the many layers of interaction taking place between an endlessly expanding and evolving crowd. In particular, social media has allowed an unprecedented spread of information, through a variety of different forms. Two of the most well-known are links and shares. A link is when someone posts a link to another page on social media, such as a link to a news article on Facebook. A share is when someone clicks the “share” option on social media, thus making a certain piece of content appear for all of their followers.
How are shares and links different, and how do they relate with the content we learned in class? According to Jayson DeMer’s article on Forbes, links are earned if a piece of content is informative or interesting enough, resulting in traffic and increased domain authority. Shares are earned by being interesting and make content more visible, building brand visibility.
This has a lot to do with the idea of innovation diffusion, which we discussed in class. How exactly a new innovation is adopted by crowds depends on a jumble of links and strong and weak ties, and how many of one’s ties have converted to the new technology. People convert to a new technology if a certain number of their links have converted, and this effect often means that people convert in clusters. In the case of links and shares, there isn’t much commitment, but whether a link affects the same amount of people as a share is an interesting topic of research and observation. How does the way something is shared or presented affect the way people view it? I would think that there wouldn’t be a huge difference, unless the shared and linked posts are presented significantly differently. However, links in general are probably more noticeable because people put more effort into posting them, rather than just clicking a “share” button. This means that close friends may pay closer attention to whatever those links point to.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/08/30/links-vs-shares-which-is-more-important/#6e289ad77f58