The social sphere is swarming with various social media tips to help your business – how to get more likes, when to post, where to post, etc. However no one really focuses in on the more common sense tips. I had an interesting tweet response from someone in my community that made me wonder if we shouldn’t push the common sense tips a little harder.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter (if you’re not, I’m @memktgservices) knows I tweet out previous blog posts several times each day. My most popular tweets are the ones that pertain to why people are or are not following/liking you. Today, I had a Twitter follower tweet to me that she was baffled that a social media consultant would tweet an article against Twitter, on Twitter and want people to retweet it. The title of the post was “8 More Reasons I Won’t Follow You on Twitter.” If she had actually read the post she would have known that it most definitely was not a post against Twitter.  In fact, I’m a HUGE advocate of Twitter but that’s another article for another time.

After our tweet exchange, which ended up in her favoriting and retweeting my response, it got me to thinking. This is apparently something people are doing across the board – commenting and posting without really knowing what they are commenting or posting about. This is not the first time this has happened to me, so it’s got to be happening to other authors as well.

Mallie Hart of Go Creative Go wrote on this site recently about skimming an article and posting without really reading it but this is something completely different. This is about commenting and posting based simply on the title of the article.

It amazes me how often people do this (I know, I see their comments to my posts on Twitter). How can you possibly give your two cents on something you didn’t read but only saw the title of. That would be like me seeing the post “Why UGA Isn’t Cutting it” and commenting about the football team’s lack of championships when if I had read the post, I would have found it was about private endowments to the university.

Commenting/posting about an article you haven’t read only shows how much of a fool you are. Harsh? Yes. True? You bet, even those most people are too polite to say it. Doing this lowers your credibility. You have two choices – read it and post a meaningful response or don’t read it and don’t comment.

I know you may be sitting there slinking down in your seat because you’ve done this before – trust me, we’ve all been there at one time or another. We assume without knowing the facts. I write all of this to simply say, please read the article before you decide to chime in.