Thanks, Bloggers, for all that #SundayBlogShare Love

When Suzie81 asked me to host this week’s #SundayBlogShare, I was torn. On the one hand, I was honored and wanted to jump at the chance. It’s an activity I enjoy. I love that I’ve watched it grow from nothing and have had a small part in building it.

On the other hand, I thought it might be a ton of work and that I would screw something up. I eventually decided to do it, and I am very glad I did. It did turn out to be a bit of work, but it was totally worth it. It got me a couple of good days on the blogs, I met some nice folks, and it put @Sourcererblog’s Twitter following above 5K for the first time. Needless to say, I am pleased.

Last week, I put out the word to my friends that I was hosting and invited them to join in. I also shared #SundayBlogShare with a couple of groups I am a part of on Facebook. Here’s an excerpt from one of the status updates I posted to those groups.

So, you might be interested to know that I am hosting #SundayBlogShare on Twitter right now. What being the host means, basically, is:

1. I retweet everything that is a legitimate blog post and doesn’t contain hate speech with my @sourcererblog account.
2. I look at most of the links. I comment on the ones that grab me, either on Twitter or on the blog itself.
3. I follow almost everyone who shares a link to that hashtag and they get a solid month to decide whether to follow me back.

Silly me.

Retweeting everything from that hashtag and following even three quarters of the bloggers who use it on Sundays is officially impossible, at least for an amateur like me. That’s how big it has gotten, and I had no idea. I promoted #SundayBlogShare hard the first week we did it and I join in when I can, but I wasn’t able to really pay attention for most of November. I keep up with Suzie, so I knew it was growing. I just didn’t realize how quickly it was growing.

I started monitoring the hashtag around 2 a.m. London time and just watched it. I retweeted the first few links and warned the first few people who weren’t sharing blog posts off. I typically don’t do that, and in general it’s not worth the time, but I didn’t want  to get overrun by non-blog related stuff before the bloggers started showing up. I did retweets and follows for awhile and had no problem keeping up during the early hours. At some point, I went to sleep thinking things were going fine, but it really wasn’t that busy.

When I woke up a few hours later, I jumped on my phone to see how things were looking. At that point, the hashtag was so busy it took me more than an hour just to get caught up with the retweets, and I had to give up on the following just to stay ahead. From that point, I just rolled for the next several hours, scanning blogs and retweeting links with my two Twitter accounts, and chattering as I was able. It was a lot of fun.

Sourcerer had a good day yesterday, but my personal blog, Just Gene’O picked up almost 40 referrals from Twitter, which is unheard of for me, and had its best day in a couple of months. As I was writing this, @Sourcererblog was up by a ton of followers from Sunday alone, and most of them are bloggers. I don’t manage my @JustGene’O account very closely for followers. It’s mostly there to establish that there’s a real person behind Sourcerer and to retweet my friends, but I am assuming it’s up as well and I’ll give a big bunch of followbacks with that account later this week.

Thanks to everyone who joined in with #SundayBlogShare this weekend, and thanks especially to those of you who showed up as a favor to me. I truly appreciate it. The early links and the late links that you guys shared were especially helpful, because the early ones kept the hashtag from being overwhelmed by non-blog content during the first few hours, and the late ones allowed me to extend the day.

The hosting was pretty hectic and it didn’t leave me much time to blog on Sunday. But it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, and I’d do it again. Now that I’ve watched #SundayBlogShare closely for an entire day, I have a much better feel for the rhythm of it. I’m an even bigger fan of it now than I was before I hosted, and I hope to see all you friendly bloggers for it again next week.