Google Plus Mania Blog

It’s a very serious problem for all Social users: Would you unfollow  people who just re-share and never create their own content ? For me,the answer is yes,i just can’t stand those guy who just keep reshare and reshare, like these people never ever even speak any words from their own mouse.I always thought reshare posts kinda polluted my stream,decreased the ability of information receiving. But do things really like this ?

According to  a social research report,  re-share  play important role in increasing your reach and keeping your network maintenance low. re-share also act as filters, so they reduce information overload as long as you select them from different segments. Having original sources mixed with a bridges to different segments in your circles lead to the most benefital results in terms of receiving quality content with least effort.

Maybe i should think about it before i unfollow another Google+ reshare guy next time

Do you unfollow people who just re-share and never create their own content?
I could not resist to answer this in detail, as it is highly connected to my Phd research.

Firstly it is important to note that re-share or content curator kind of people (bridges) (Structural hole theory – Ronald Stuart Burt, 1995http://goo.gl/GRAhU) play important role in extending your network and keeping your number of connection low. Since maintaining connections is costly (in practice it means you need not only read the posts of those people, but to engage with them) increasing your reach through bridging entities is valuable.

A case study people were required to evaluate products for the same purpose and pick the best one. Group of people who had high number of connections to original sources had less success than people who kept their number of connections low and used bridges as news aggregators. In the later case the network acted as a filter, some of the inferior choices were eliminated by the bridges. (Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning by Ellison and Fudenberg, 1995 http://goo.gl/QgdxB)

The golden rule of life suggests avoid extremes applies as well: You need to keep healthy a balance between bridging actors and original sources. Furthermore it is important to select the bridging participants (re-share) of your network (circles) from different segments. If you select people from the same network segment only (eg. same interest group /photography/, same geographical area, etc), chances are they are all going to be densely interconnected. Dense connections lead to high level of entropy, overload from redundant:information.(The Strength of Weak Ties by. Mark S. Granovetter, 1973 http://goo.gl/eWo8O) In practice this means re-sharing the same content by many different people in your circles. In other words you would see the same post judged to be interested in your stream a number of times.

To sum it up bridges (re-share) play important role in increasing your reach and keeping your network maintenance low. Bridges also act as filters, so they reduce information overload as long as you select them from different segments. Having original sources mixed with a bridges to different segments in your circles lead to the most benefital results in terms of receiving quality content with least effort.