If you want more of something, reblog it
If you operate within a community — of writers, reader, scrollers, posters, meme-creators, TikTok’ers and on and on and on, you don’t need to worry so much about SEO and tags and search engines or being featured. If you are part of a community, the community takes care of you, makes sure to pass the work on between themselves, onto their blogs and sites and social media outlets, and your work gets exposed to their followers. It’s a chain reaction of community.
And it just comes back around to you because people who are like-minded will find you, and you will find them.
If you want more of something, reblog it.
It’s all about the type of interaction people have. It’s one thing to like, but a like doesn’t do anything more than stroke the ego of the original poster. A like is just a nod, a wave, a brief moment of interest. Creators need and want more. And that more can come in a lot of forms, depending on the platform.
On Medium, there are claps, and a reader can clap as many as 50 times. Those claps add up. There’s nothing quite like having 500 or 1000 claps on your story. On every social media platform, you can make comments, and comments matter. It’s a great way to interact with the author and to give the author, or creator, a way to interact with you. It’s about building that community. On Twitter and Threads and other platforms, you can RT or repost. Or on Twitter, people use QT (quote tweet) with additional commentary, a note, praise, or related new content. It’s a great way to show the creator, the original poster, or OP, that you appreciated what they did there, even if it was a clever dad joke.
But ultimately, what really matter is whether or not you reblogged it. RT’d it. QT’d it. Reposted it. Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.
Did you subscribe to my stories here on Medium? On Substack? Awesome. Do you follow me on Tumblr or Threads or Instagram? Great. I appreciate that. Do you “like” my stuff? Thank you. But really, ultimately, what I want and hope you will do is reblog me. Show me that what I did or do hits the mark with you enough that you want to share it with someone else.
That’s a great compliment. That’s the ultimate compliment. Reblog me.
But, reblogging me isn’t just a way for me to get noticed or feel appreciated. If you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in any way; they just make the OP feel good. Reblogs, on the other hand, make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle social media algorithm that hardly gets people noticed. Reblogs, however, are where the magic happens.
If you want more of something, reblog it.
You might think, “I don’t have many followers, so my reblog won’t matter.” This is not true.
Reblogging, commenting and interacting is how you start gathering your own micro community. Your reblogging of content shows other people what you are interested in. It makes it easier for you to find your people without having to always try and be creative. Lean on someone else’s creativity and show everyone “This is the shit that I like.” Build your community of D&D nerds or scifi geeks or writers or erotica readers or dog lovers or politicos by reblogging and letting other discover who you are and what you want to see.
Also — you literally do not know how far a single reblog from you could go in the long run. You can’t know.
For instance, let’s say you only have one person reblog from you, and that person only has one person who reblogged from them also, and so on, and somewhere ten reblogs down the line a very large blog reblogs it, and boom, the post is getting more and more exposure! It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a large following so long as you cultivate a micro community with the people you do enjoy interacting daily with. Reblogs get around.
Even if someone just randomly wanders into your blog one day, it’s beneficial for both sides. Seeing you reblog content they like might be enough for them to follow you. They would be exposed to new content creators they didn’t know previously and might also follow / reblog from them!
So yes, do not underestimate what your reblogs and words mean, just because you’re not ‘big’ or whatever. Reblogs are the key to creating and maintaining a community of like-minded people, supporters and supportive folks who share interests, encourage each other’s creativity, and engender a feeling of community and togetherness. Reblogs matter.
If you want more of something, reblog it.