So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.
I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.
Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.
One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?
And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.
Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.
What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?
Enjoy this advice about social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
8 Responses
I’ve been thinking of this as well. We’re in a content rich era. The content itself isn’t that rich, but there’s plenty of it. Having someone I trust point out the sparklies would be nice. In a way, that used to be the job of editors. They were the gatekeepers of cool. That class is diminishing. Additionally, I think publishing will turn into a true collective. If you’re a newbie, you’ll need some recognized stamp of approval. Cross promotion, without it seeming forced or false, is what will allow the ecology of our genre to survive. Similar authors will collect like turtles on their little islands and bark out, if you like so-and-so, then you’ll like my friend so-and-so who writes something similar. I totally plan to start promoting my friends and their work though, it seems a good use for my blog.
Oh, glad you’re going to be writing about Swann. I remember talking about him with you at Orycon. If there’s an author ripe for rediscovery, he’s it.
As for social networking, I’m unable to leave it alone and unable to find a way to do it effectively and efficiently. Basically, argh.
I just adore Swann’s stuff. I realized that it was a huge huge influence on the world I use in the Tabat stories.
This is one of the hardest parts of writing for me. I love Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc, but it’s really hard to keep up with the cyber world and hard to gauge where your own presence has the most effect. I want a robot who will take all my thoughts and selectively clever them up for tweets, FB/G+ posts and blogs, then report back to me everything people said on every platform.
One of the odd crossovers lately has been the amount of comments I get when I link to my blog on Facebook. The blog itself doesn’t garner many comments in the comments section, but many people leave their thoughts on Facebook. This is nice but it sort of defeats the purpose of having a blog open to the whole Internet–the comments by anyone should encourage strangers to comment and make it look “hot,” so to speak. C’est la writing in the digital age, I spose.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past year, and I don’t have any good answers. I’ve given up on LiveJournal, and in some ways that makes me really sad, because I miss the community I had built there, but in other ways, it’s let me be more productive, because I don’t feel like I have to keep up.
I’d gotten into a weird spiral where I felt bad about not posting enough, and also about not staying caught up, and all that feeling bad made me less productive over all, because instead of reading some of my friends’ entries, or writing more of my own, I’d think about how some friends might feel sad if I didn’t get to their posts, and also how it might not be fair to post my own entries without having time to read and respond to others, and then I just wouldn’t do anything, but I’d worry about it, which took energy.
Now I float between G+, Facebook, and Twitter. I think I use Twitter the least, but it’s also the one I will be more likely to use if I am out and only have my phone available. Facebook has all my family and a lot of my close friends, so I tend to check in there regularly and skim my stream, but I post usually for friends and family and not as much for writing stuff. G+ I love for keeping track of stuff like your class, or planning outings with some of my local friends who use it, and I sometimes use it to share interesting links or talk about work (but not as much as maybe I should?).
The best thing to me about my current approach is that I don’t feel guilty about not seeing things. I interact when I see something that sparks me to converse, but I don’t ever feel like I need to have seen everything (let alone comment on everything). I don’t mind what other people post, but I’m more likely to interact with people who are posting about stuff they genuinely find interesting (whether it’s the brownies they just ate, or an article about a new kind of lizard, or even work-related stuff they’re excited or bummed about), and not just posting impersonal streams of stuff that boils down to ads for their work.
I’m coming around to thinking “enough” is a level of interaction that makes me feel like I’m still connected to people I find interesting, and “too much” is a level of interaction that leaves me feeling guilty and/or unproductive.
They are all tools and I use them for different things, much like you don’t use a hammer (Twitter), when you need a rake (blog), or use a saw (Google plus), when you need a screwdriver (Livejournal). For me, Twitter is my way to broadcast to different hashtags that I think will find the information I have to share interesting.
Facebook is more friendly. Like you, my family and real-life friends are there. I was being more political there, but have found that it backfires mostly because many people don’t understand the unspoken rules of social networking that if you don’t agree with the post, unless the poster specifically asks for discussion, they likely don’t want it. They want to share with like minds. So, I’ve backed off the political stuff — unless say it affects my creativity, like the SOPA/PIPA stuff. So Facebook is to engage my nearest audience. Twitter more far away. I use both to direct traffic to my blog or project site (e.g., http://www.martiuscatalyst.com). Both tools are useless unless they drive people back to my blog (one of my new year’s resolutions is to get the traffic on my blog up.) Google plus is my land of rebels and highly technical folks. I seem to cross post most to G+, as it is still fledgling, but I can see its usefulness down the road as a clearing house and where I can target messages to specific circles (and perhaps dispense with twitter and facebook all together). I also use LJ to connect to other authors, writers, artists. My LJ that contains my most personal thoughts, but I keep that friends only — even given that some of them I’ve never personally met. Rarely is my messaging crossing over, since each has a different audience. And that, I suppose, is the point of all of it. What’s too much and what’s not enough? Unless I can direct something back specifically to me the author or my work — given that includes the things that inspire and motivate me — I don’t repost/retweet. That seems to give it a balance. At least, that is, for me.
Currently I use the different platforms for different kinds of communication, and it works pretty well for me. When/If I reach the point where it makes sense to have an author page, then I’ll have to find some new equilibrium; I’m not sure what would go there as opposed to something else. Intuitively it seems that little to conversation happens on fan pages–only promotional stuff, like release dates, signings, and contests.
The only thing I cross post is links to my own blog, and I feel badly about it, but not badly enough not do do it. 😉 I used to have a circle exclusively for people who were not already getting those tweets on facebook and twitter, but Google+ is now such a big part of Google’s other search results–but only if you post publicly that I feel like I need to post those links publicly for SEO purposes. (I know . . . I feel slimy just using that acronym, but what can you do?)
I enjoy Twitter and find it the least time-consuming. Do you use something like Tweetdeck? I find that Tweetdeck allows me to casually follow the stream without having to actively focus on it. I just reply to whatever moves me to reply. Also, it is possible to do the equivalent of +1-ing a post–you can “favorite” it. Nobody really knows except the poster, but I’m pleased whenever one of my tweets gets a favorite.
You’re right about the lack of privacy/intimacy in your conversations, but if you wanted privacy or intimacy, would you be *networking*?
I quite LJ several years ago – it was just too depressing. Twitter is a write-only channel for me. I never, ever read it. FB is also becoming very much a write-only site. There are a handful of groups and people I keep up with every couple of days, but I have cut down the time I read FB to minutes a day. It’s also useful for helping organize events sometimes, but I really do find a big generational bell curve on FB.
I tend to think that I live a very uninteresting life (well, not to me but mostly to other people), yet when I see a post from my niece that she’s up at 3am with a tummy-ache, I’m not so sure my self-view is valid. I think I’m more focused on living life rather than talking about it, I guess.