If you have been following me on Twitter and Facebook you know I use the term ‘Linkster’ frequently.  Since I get so many people emailing me asking what I mean when I refer to someone as a ‘Linkster’ I thought I would provide a brief definition I could refer to when I am asked this question.

Linkster: A person who:

1. plays Golf
2. posts in the social spaces (Twitter, Facebook..etc) online Links to blogs or articles posted by someone else and has no communication to those who respond to their posts nor cares to respond to any response or comment made to their any of their posts.

Obviously, I am referring to the second definition when I use the term in the context of how someone is socializing online.  Most of the time a Linkster will use programs and third party applications to automate their posts so they have little association with the social spaces they populate. There are a few Linksters who will manually post links and then leave the site without responding to anyone who is reaching out to them to get to know them better.

The individual Linkster usually are mimicking the larger businesses who are the major Linksters of the social spaces.  Their thinking usually is..if the big dogs are just posting links on Twitter maybe I should be doing that as well.

Linksters prefer their method of social networking to not be exposed and when confronted will explain they do not have the time to use traditional methods of social media and post ONLY Links to develop a higher Page Ranking.  Since this method of social (or unsocial) networking is looked down upon by the other residences of the social space the Linksters generally get blocked or deleted from people’s contact list since the majority of people using the social spaces are there to build meaningful relationships with the other members.

As Google and the other search engines move to clean up their feeds so more people will depend on their recommendation as being valid resources the Linksters method of social media will eventually be devalued, if not banned.  Unfortunately, many of the people who use the Linkster method of social media are part of a business or firm who has invested an exorbitant amount of funds in this type of marketing plan making changing to a more effective method of social media not an option.

Currently, the only way to get a Linkster to recognize the wrong doings of their method of broadcasting to their community is to confront them directly or to delete their profile from a contact list. Sometimes, seeing the number of followers diminishing will catch their attention or seeing their analytic programs showing their view rates dropping like lead balloons will get their attention.  Getting them to stop or change is the challenge since they have reams of unverifiable data they again paid dearly for that backs their reasoning for posting only links.  The only effective method of getting Linksters to move to more effective methods of social media have been those actions taken to reduce their revenue generated or bottomline.

Happy hunting for Linksters and hope this helps explain what I am talking about.

Let me know how I can help.