Social Media

Today's post was inspired by a discussion going on in my writing group at Dave Farland's Writing Groups. One of our members, Justin Jeppesen, who is new to the Twitter thing (me, too) asked for some suggestions. I'm going to share Robin Week's response because it's so good:

For Twitter:

• Participate in the hashtag chats, like #yalitchat and #askagent (when you see one going, click on the hastag and it will take you to a screen where you can see what everyone else is tweeting with that hashtag)--everyone there will see your tweets and you'll pick up followers that way.
• Comment on others' posts, start up conversations, etc--don't just tweet about your books: be interesting
• Follow the people you'd like to have follow you--an email is sent to everyone you follow (well, depending on their settings) and a lot of people will auto-follow or will at least check you out for a possible follow if you follow them first
• DON'T connect Twitter to Facebook--it is annoying to those who follow you in both places. Use Twitter for little things and Facebook for larger things and, for huge things, post separately on both.

For the Blog:

• Have a regular schedule of posting, so your followers can anticipate your posts (I've just started posting Tuesday night and Saturday morning--if I can keep it up for a few weeks, I'll post my schedule on my blog), too.
• Interesting titles, to entice followers and others to read your posts
• Participate in blogfests--those are when you register your list your blog on the host's blog with the other participants and then do something specific with your own blog--there's an April A-Z blogfest going on in April, if you're interested: posting every day but Sundays in April--then everyone is encouraged to visit the other blogs in the fest
• Tweet about your new blog entries (this is where your interesting titles come in) with a bit.ly link to the blog post

In General:

• Social media is SOCIAL--you need to get out there, comment on others' blogs, comment on tweets, etc. Elana Johnson (who has almost 2000 blog followers) went through a period where she commented on 50 blogs a day!!
• Don't diss others--everyone can see your tiff and no one thinks you're cool when you're whining

And as Robin also suggests, you can check out Beth Revis' post on this topic here.




How comfortable are you with social media? Do you find it difficult to balance all the other aspects of your life--like writing--with the time it takes to Twitter, Facebook, Blog, etc.? How are you making it work for you?