A little over a year ago I introduced the Twitter balance score as a way of encouraging people to focus on conversation and sharing with their Twitter strategy rather than merely using Twitter as a promotion tool. The idea was that once you “scored” ten points you were free to do a promotionally oriented Tweet.

Since introducing the Twitter balance score and presenting it to many groups in that time I’ve been encouraged at the feedback about its helpfulness but have also sensed that questions remain about whether this could be applied to other conversation tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

With this nagging feeling I revisited the Twitter balance score and tweaked it a bit so it will work for all conversation platforms. With that, I’m excited to introduce the Conversation Balance Score as a means of focusing your conversation strategies on sharing much more than promoting.

Here’s the scoring method:

• Share a link and give a bit of commentary: 3 points
• Repost or ReTweet someone’s interesting update: 3 points
• Ask a question: 2 points
• Respond or reply to a comment: 2 points
• Provide and interesting/funny/poingant update: 1 point

As with the original Twitter balance score, the idea here is to do enough share-based activity so that once you have attained at least ten points you’ve earned enough share-driven attention to be a little more self serving.

If you have trouble coming up with things to talk about that aren’t promotion oriented, try using the RISSO method for conversation starters. It should help spark some ideas for you to start conversing better.