Too blitzed to throw your hat into the big pond of Technorati? Instead, build your audience through friends ... and friends of friends ... and friends of friends who once dated your coworker's cousin. That's the beauty of social networking sites like Facebook (the pet du jour), MySpace (kinda tweeny, but still au courant) and Linked In (a professional tool).
As of February 2010, Facebook has 400 million users; the average one spends 55 minutes a day on the site. A lot of online energy is massing there now. Grab that tiger by the tail to promote your blog.
But don't make it all about promotion. Would you go out for beers and only talk about your work all night? No? Then don't abuse Facebook as just a pulpit for your fabulousness. Mix things up with witty asides about your awesome new media class and that wacky Jamaican cabdriver with the Confederate flag on his shirt, who insists "someone has to play the Controversial Negro" (my friend, the writer Litsa Dremousis, reported on this recently – and the comments delved deep into race relations. FB may be ephemeral, but it also tightens the bonds between us, as these Newsweek and New York Times articles point out).
As we noted last week, take heed of the 80/20 rule. Experts agree that readers respond best when only one blog post in five is a plug. Some grey area exists, certainly, such as writing in your field of expertise without explicitly pushing your brand. But by and large people are online to be entertained or to solve a problem: don't clutter the scene with relentless hustling.
Once you're a Facebook member, you can post items, like links and status reports (synopses of what you're doing). These show on your wall, potentially alongside comments from folks on an approved list of friends. I note my new blog entries and traffic always spikes.
More people commented in the semiprivate (invitation only) forum of Facebook than on the original Road Remedies entry. While that's frustrating – I like a good comment-field furor – that "FB" link brought loads of readers: at least 10x the norm. As the song almost goes, "then I saw the faith and I'm a believer!"
I experimented with a lot of Facebook applications that promised to automatically feed new blog posts on to Facebook. To date, they all sucked or looked ugly. But posting a link takes mere seconds. On your profile page, click the box that asks "What's on your mind?" Icons appear underneath for photos, video, events and links (the thumbtack). Press the thumbtack, then paste in the permalink's URL. Your headline and initial text should load: you can edit these, if you like. You can also choose which image to display.
I won't pull punches: Facebook can be a massive time-suck (an average of 55 minutes a day!). People you'd long forgotten tap you for Farmville showdowns and send you digital bouquets. It's absurd. But this – and other social networking "Web 2.0" sites – are where a lot of the action's at: don't miss it all.
Twitter is a step more streamlined: basically it only broadcasts 140-character snippets, calls twits and tweets, along with pictures, mainly uploaded straight from cell/mobile phones. Readers can "follow" (subscribe) to specific feeds like amandacastleman or search for topics (indicated by hashtags like #iran09). Sounds insipid, of the "what I had for lunch" ilk, right? And it can be ... case in point, the lady who inadvertently landed her 15 minutes of fame for this instant classic: "I am totally serious. My Ob/Gyn was IN my vagina and an earthquake started rattling the room!" Less than two hours later, CNET was interviewing the hapless over-sharer.
On the flip side, good content – like Alaska Airlines' tweets about flight availability and airport access during a volcano-eruption alert – wins praise from users and the industry both. And often the medium's ahead of the press pack these days – or goes where reporters can't. A tweeter scooped every news outlet on the Hudson River plane crash. During the Iranian election protests, the government prevented foreign journalists from reporting, then locked down Internet access. Via proxy servers, word snuck out on Twitter and other 2.0 social media. The BBC explained the trend, while Boing Boing egged the cyberwar along.
Mashable calls Twitter the world's new water cooler. A look at its most popular 2009 topics shows the scope of the conversation, from Michael Jackson to swine flu, Google Wave and #drunkwords. Tools like Trend Tracker analyze the buzz and can help predict what topics will hot up. Sites like Alltop take it a step further and publish news digests based on intel like this. In turn that makes them great sources of ideas and authoritative links...
Convinced? Pick a user name, then start scouting for folks to follow (meaning that you subscribe to their broadcasts). Many will return the favor by following you. And thus the network starts to grow...
You can tweet via a website or mobile phone via the site itself, text message or software like Twitterific, Feedalizr or iPhone app Twinkle. Be creative with words, omit nonessential ones and rely on abbreviations to make your 140 characters convey as much original material as possible. Use URL shorteners like tinyurl or bit.ly to compress long links. Retweet – forward – dynamic posts by folks in your network. Hash-tag your topics (yes, it's tedious, but it attracts new audience members). Be wary of software like Tweetdeck, which can push your content to other social media platforms (note: many Facebook users dislike the compact, hash-tagged comments, especially as such tweets tend to be more promotional). Here social-media expert BL Ochman offers some tips on good Twitter practice.
As a narrative writer, I don't find microblogging true competition for blogging or more in-depth journalism. Two-line posts won't satisfy my yen for plot arc, even if we go all six-word Hemingway: "For sale, baby shoes, never worn". But I agree with writer Don George, keynote speaker at the Alaska Media Show:" A great Tweet is still a great piece of writing, it’s just a different medium."
A quick look at a few terrific posts, some by the "twitterati":
- capricecrane: In South Florida, a priest got a stripper pregnant. No word on what the Rabbi, the bartender & horse were doing.
- badbanana: An Xbox signed by Sarah Palin is being sold for $1.1 million. Laugh now, but imagine how much it'll be worth if the Xbox becomes president.
- kolchak: National poetry day is not an excuse for you to take your time in making my Americano. Leaves rustle. My heart aches. There will be blood.
- adamisacson: Gmail and Google Calendar let me keep my work-related stresses "in the cloud." But I keep a backup copy in my neck and shoulder muscles.
- nickclayton: Turned on British telly. Apparently world is coming to an end. No. It’s snowing in London. Proof third runway needed to boost global warming.
- trelvix: Fair Trade Monday: You don’t offer your seat to the old woman on the train; I don’t tell you about the bird shit on your overcoat. Deal?
Check out the creme de la creme at the Shorty Awards, given each spring to top tweeters:
Twitter is a great tool for pushing information – and harvesting it too. Reporters and bloggers solicit sources and find story ideas via the site, just like CNET's Dawn Kawamoto jumping on the `OB/GYN earthquake angle. Here you can read about the conversion of New York Times tech guru David Pogue, who especially praises the intelligence-gathering aspects. Let the stream of information flow both ways...
In a time when email fatigue is rife, many folks are resistant to Twitter and social media: "Not another computer obligation!" remains a frequent complaint, along with "why work more for free?" But these are great tools for bloggers and writers alike: for branding, sourcing material, reading to keep your expertise current, finding interviewees, attracting an audience, building community, honing your pithy writing chops. Self-promotion. Self-expression. Storytelling in dynamic new ways.
I hid from Twitter and Facebook for years, cranky and overwhelmed. In fact, colleagues had to shame me publicly to explore these sites ("You call yourself a new-media instructor?"). Now they've become essential to the daily flow of my business and personal life.
Why not give it a try? You can always close your accounts, if they prove to detract more than they add...
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