It is a social world and social media has exploded in the last couple of years, leading to millions and millions spending large portions of their lives on the internet. If you are an avid internet junkie and like to keep up with trends and the latest happenings, you will probably read a lot of news sites and blogs like me. But, the question is, beside those well known sites like News24, Search Engine journal or TechCrunch – how do we find those sites that we want to read, and what makes a site actually worth reading? What I am getting at here is that, many sites completely rely on their social media to get themselves a reputation and all their traffic. If it was not for the social fans aspect many of these sites would just never be found, or more to the point when they are and you read them, you would see that many of them are of a low quality.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Stumbleupon etc, there are a multitude of social media sites that millions of people flock to everyday, and hours and hours are spent on these sites. On Twitter for example, we follow those we find interesting or those that a lot of others follow (just because, let’s face it, we are often like sheep), often these tweets have a link, which takes us to something they are promoting. This will frequently be a blog that we now see as a source of info, but in reality, it is just not that good.

How many blogs do you see pop up every day or in fact the best example is that how many twitter accounts do you see that have a big following, suddenly start a site or blog. They see that they have all these people who “listen or like” what they have to say, so what do they do? They think they can start a site.

There are many blogs that produce absolute rubbish and have the sole goal of generating traffic in an attempt to generate revenue through Adsense or some other form of advertising. I won’t mention names but I will say I am referring to some South African and Worldwide sites, if you read an article going into it without knowing what site it was on you would be shocked. What you also see a lot of is internet pollution, what I mean by this is that often sites will just use duplicate content and copy paste info into a post. More so, even the bigger sites will do a press release and no matter how poor the quality is, there will still be plenty of shares and other sites will copy the content. Often I am left feeling really disappointed at the quality of some reputable sites, as they post for the sake of posting.

How regularly, and be honest, do you tweet/share without reading the article? You have not read it, but yet you have shared it with all your connections, so this is my point. It might be a credit to title of the article or content, but sites are able to spread their often poor content and we are hugely to blame. Many times will you stumble on a site and see that it has 1239 tweets, immediately you think “hey this must be good if everyone is sharing it”, but the fact is, on many occasion you are sharing poor quality content and, if you are an avid sharer, your reputation could take a hit.

What I would advise, if you are feeling up to it and really want to be seen as a person who knows what they are talking about, is go through all the sites you follow and actually see if they are quality. Before you share something, read it – I personally have made the error of tweeting some poor content and my followers were not impressed.