Last Updated on April 20, 2020

Back in the beginning of this year, a project was born: The Social Media Mega Project, initiated by Vivien at InspirationBit, and divided in several sections to be hosted by a group of bloggers.

The final objective of this project was to gather bloggers insights about social media: how they use certain sites, why do they use them, what are their likes and their objections to each particular social media site.

I hosted here the Sphinn section, hoping to see some of the frequent sphinners have their say about their favorite network.

These are the articles we’ve got to this section of the group:

• Front Page Sphinn by Simon
• Some Quick Notes On Sphinn by Karen Zara

I want to thank Simon and Karen Zara for their thoughts, and for finding the time to submit their articles.

I also want to thank the 4 sphinners who thought this project might be useful for the Sphinn community, and gave their vote for it: bhartzer, DoshDosh, planetc1 and SlightlyShadySEO. It is easy to figure out that my submission never made the front page. I didn’t do it for the traffic. I don’t need traffic from social media. I did it because I really wanted to hear from people who use Sphinn every day, why they use it and how is that useful for them.

When I submitted, I was 99% sure the post will make the front page, and I’ll see at least 8-9 articles written as a consequence of my announcement. The post never got sphinners’ attention and this was probably due to a few possible reasons:

• The group of active sphinners who actually make things happen in there, is very small. They would gladly vote for each other’s stories, because they already know that they submit only quality stuff. Probably most of them don’t even check out submissions from people they don’t know, and this is perfectly understandable in this world suffocated by spam.
• Although I like Sphinn and I used to spend some time there every day, I don’t submit too many articles, nor do I comment very often on other submissions.
• My approach of the Sphinn community was wrong: instead of just submitting my announcement, I should have contacted one of the top sphinners and ask him to submit the story for me. Then the whole core community would have given their votes: if an opinion leader, a trend setter, asks you to help, you’d gladly do it. But I am not comfortable with the idea of emailing people who are probably too busy anyway. I believe one has to be shameless to do this, but I can understand this is how things work and I accept the consequences.
• Sphinn is an extremely focused community. They deal with internet marketing, they discuss the new, the events, the stories which are exclusively about internet marketing. They can write about their cats and get the attention of their colleagues, but this is only because their cats are the cats of internet marketers. My cat is of no interest for them.
• Sphinn is an ongoing competition between friends. They fight to be the first to discover and submit great stories to the community. They strive to climb the social ladder of quality, so they would not vote for a story which has few chances of hitting the front page. They would damage their profile. It’s like in school, students who had only the highest grades where very proud of being the best, and for them, getting an A- would have been a disaster.

If you want to stay informed about internet marketing, visiting Sphinn every day is useful. If you want to enter a closed community and make friends there, you first need to prove something to them: you need to prove them that you are committed to their community, to enhancing the knowledge there, you need to be the first who submits the news in internet marketing. Briefly, be prepared to spend some two months of your life chasing great internet marketing stories and submitting them to Sphinn.

If you just want some backlinks for your pages, Sphinn is not the place for you, so don’t waste your time in submitting your posts in there.

Social Media Success Is About Approach And Action

On every other blog out there, we can read about the importance of communication, of participating in social networks, of becoming a “power user” (how I love these words!). But most of it is just talking. Telling people that something is important, and that this is the way things should be done, and not doing what you preach, is a bit strange. Actually, if it was that important, you would have done it more often yourself.

Somebody told me about two people who were trying to make money online, and after 6 months of reading two of the blogs in that niche, they were still not making any money.

Of course they don’t. Reading alone doesn’t help. It’s what you go and DO after you finish reading, it’s how you apply the knowledge you’ve got, that brings you results.

Hundreds of bloggers agree and write about the importance of “writing good content”, of “commenting on other blogs”, of “participating in group projects”, and then we get only a handful of interested people (out of the thousands of RSS feed subscribers we have) who have something to say.

What do you think?