Paul and Storm

Let’s say you just had an interesting or funny thought, and you want to get the most mileage out of it on social media. Where should you post it? Facebook? Twitter? Or a community like Reddit or Fark? Or your blog? All of them?

Of course the answer is “it depends on what it is”. But just for grins (and until I have the time to put together a detailed flow chart), I decided to post a picture that I thought might have “legs” to several venues, and see which garnered the most feedback.

Surprisingly, the venue where we have the smallest footprint (Reddit) was the surprise winner (35 karma as of this moment). Facebook, where we have ~1,100 Friends / ~2,000 Fan Page Likes, also showed strong with 19 Likes and a few comments. Twitter, ostensibly our strongest outlet at ~24,000 Followers, not so much: 7 Retweets, 4 Favorites, and not a word was spoken.

So what gives? To be fair, when the Boss Hogg image first popped into my head, Reddit came to mind. Redditors gobble up pictures as a core part of the experience, and loooove them some memes! Facebook, too, is geared for in-house picture viewing, and I’ve found that feedback is almost always proportionally higher–probably because people know that when you post on someone’s wall, they’re almost guaranteed to see it.

That’s not always the case with Twitter. Picture-viewing can be a little more cumbersome on Twitter, depending on what interface you’re using. And yes, Paul and I are diligent about checking our @ Reply list, especially after posting something that especially tickled us, but there’s no way for people to know for sure. But more than that, most of our Twitterfolk aren’t broad-meme oriented. Appreciating obscure hastag memes like #ScatHistoryQuotes, where they can demonstrate their own powers of clever, yes. Acknowledging a well-framed “repertory” meme? Less likely.

Conclusion? Keeping up with several different channels is a pain in the ass. Though the jury’s still out on blog feedback…