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Several times I've attended presentations at conventions on "social media as a tool for authors". In general, I've found these presentations of questionable value, at least for me. The basic principles they have in common seem to center around:
* More followers is good. Seek to maximize your following. Mutual following is a key component of this.
* Interact with others not only by providing original content (especially reminders of your product) but by regular topic-specific re-tweeting/re-posting.
* Automate your social media presence to as great a degree as possible so it doesn't use up valuable writing time.
Now I could see -- hypothetically speaking -- how someone who has a large potential fan base could construct a social media life around a great many mutual follower relationship and the regular provision of content, assuming that the relationships involved are asymmetric. I.e., the writer is primarily a source of content and interacts with other people's messages only on an extremely limited basis when directly addressed. It is less easy to see how a model like this would be useful for a new writer who doesn't have the social cachet to be listened to.
Let me give an example of the problem. I could easily inflate the numbers of my twitter followers significantly by the mutual-following of people whose followers are in the five-figure range. I imagine that these people must have some sort of bot that follows people for them and then drops them if not mutually-followed within a set time period. (I base this model on noticing certain twitter accounts with only a vague tangential connection to mine -- e.g., we're both authors -- that have followed me multiple times, and then presumably unfollowed when I didn't respond.) The problem: how would it actually benefit me to mutually-follow this person? (This is a point where I want English to have a verb prefix indicating mutual action, the way Welsh and Old Norse have.) Is a person who has 13,000 followers actually going to read anything I post? No. Is someone whose interests are so tangential to mine likely to retweet anything I post? No. If they did, are their 13,000 followers likely to read what I posted? It depends on how asymmetrical their following is. Are they a celebrity with people hanging on their every word? Then maybe. (For example, I imagine that when John Scalzi retweets something, it attracts a fair number of eyeballs.) If their followers are other people with 13,000 followers? Not likely.
I originally joined various social media systems in order to have personal connections with people. On facebook, I originally had a rule that I had to know someone in person. When I began expanding that to include people I knew generally through various reading communities and organizations, I lost any ability to read more than a fraction of my feed. Now you're only guaranteed my eyeballs if I've flagged you as someone whose postings I want to be notified of. For the rest, it depends on whether you're at the top of the feed when I have time to skim it.
On twitter, my approach was slightly different as I didn't start out with a known community of existing friends. Instead I started following people with interesting opinions and activities in the SFF field and in lesbian publishing, and then added new people as I encountered them in other people's conversations. When other people follow me first, my rule of thumb is that -- unless they have an absolutely fascinating feed -- I'll only follow back if their interests are relevant to mine, they primarily post original material (not endless retweets), and the existing number of people they follow suggests that I have a hope in hell that they might actually be reading things I post occasionally. Even so, several months ago I reached the stage where I had no hope at all of even skimming my entire feed on anything like a regular basis. So I set up a list I call "core reading" which contains the people where I want to read every single thing they post. I set up another list called "secondary reading" which includes people who say interesting things but where I don't feel the need to keep up the same way (or where they post a significant volume of retweets, which I can't filter out in lists the way I can in my main feed). Out of just short of 500 people I'm following, currently 66 are on my core reading list, 23 on my secondary reading list, which leaves slightly over 400 people to be read when I have the leisure time to scroll in more detail. So while I haven't approached anywhere near the asymmetry of the 13,000-follower folks, I'm already drifting into the realm of a significant mis-match between my apparent numbers and my actual interactions.
In terms of how social media promotes my own writing, I have to say that I consider facebook to be only marginally useful. I'm on a number of fb groups related to lesbian books, but find that even in the ones that involved discussion (as opposed to being filled with promotional posts) my work and interests rarely fit into the focus of the group. Being involved in those groups has led to being mutual friends with people I've interacted with there, but when I survey who is actually commenting on or "liking" my posts, extremely few of the interactions are with people I know from the lesbian book groups. My "author" page (which I created largely because I keep my personal feed friends-locked and wanted a public "handle" that people could find easily) is "liked" primarily by people who not only are on my friends list but who are in fact in-person friends of mine. And I refuse to play any of facebook's "pay for exposure" games so it's likely to stay that way.
On twitter, I've not only made a number of very useful contacts for getting my books exposure (e.g., connecting with reviewers) but I've made a number of friends that I hope to expand into the face-to-face realm at some point, as well as reaching a "comfortable to talk with" level with many more people. Twitter has been very useful for gaining a "sense of the field" in publishing, as well as helping me identify new (or old) books I'd be interested in reading, blogs and podcasts I'm interested in following, and so forth. Some of this difference in success may be due to the greater control one has over one's twitter feed (though goodness knows, twitter's been talking about changing that for the worse), but some of it is a matter of the difference in how the networks are structured and how much easier it is to casually join conversations that lead to new contacts. And I suspect some of it has to do with differences in which groups of people are using which social media venues.
By all the rules of "how authors should use social media for promotion" I'm probably an utter failure. But for my own purposes, using my own rules, I've found a few things that work for me rather well.
* More followers is good. Seek to maximize your following. Mutual following is a key component of this.
* Interact with others not only by providing original content (especially reminders of your product) but by regular topic-specific re-tweeting/re-posting.
* Automate your social media presence to as great a degree as possible so it doesn't use up valuable writing time.
Now I could see -- hypothetically speaking -- how someone who has a large potential fan base could construct a social media life around a great many mutual follower relationship and the regular provision of content, assuming that the relationships involved are asymmetric. I.e., the writer is primarily a source of content and interacts with other people's messages only on an extremely limited basis when directly addressed. It is less easy to see how a model like this would be useful for a new writer who doesn't have the social cachet to be listened to.
Let me give an example of the problem. I could easily inflate the numbers of my twitter followers significantly by the mutual-following of people whose followers are in the five-figure range. I imagine that these people must have some sort of bot that follows people for them and then drops them if not mutually-followed within a set time period. (I base this model on noticing certain twitter accounts with only a vague tangential connection to mine -- e.g., we're both authors -- that have followed me multiple times, and then presumably unfollowed when I didn't respond.) The problem: how would it actually benefit me to mutually-follow this person? (This is a point where I want English to have a verb prefix indicating mutual action, the way Welsh and Old Norse have.) Is a person who has 13,000 followers actually going to read anything I post? No. Is someone whose interests are so tangential to mine likely to retweet anything I post? No. If they did, are their 13,000 followers likely to read what I posted? It depends on how asymmetrical their following is. Are they a celebrity with people hanging on their every word? Then maybe. (For example, I imagine that when John Scalzi retweets something, it attracts a fair number of eyeballs.) If their followers are other people with 13,000 followers? Not likely.
I originally joined various social media systems in order to have personal connections with people. On facebook, I originally had a rule that I had to know someone in person. When I began expanding that to include people I knew generally through various reading communities and organizations, I lost any ability to read more than a fraction of my feed. Now you're only guaranteed my eyeballs if I've flagged you as someone whose postings I want to be notified of. For the rest, it depends on whether you're at the top of the feed when I have time to skim it.
On twitter, my approach was slightly different as I didn't start out with a known community of existing friends. Instead I started following people with interesting opinions and activities in the SFF field and in lesbian publishing, and then added new people as I encountered them in other people's conversations. When other people follow me first, my rule of thumb is that -- unless they have an absolutely fascinating feed -- I'll only follow back if their interests are relevant to mine, they primarily post original material (not endless retweets), and the existing number of people they follow suggests that I have a hope in hell that they might actually be reading things I post occasionally. Even so, several months ago I reached the stage where I had no hope at all of even skimming my entire feed on anything like a regular basis. So I set up a list I call "core reading" which contains the people where I want to read every single thing they post. I set up another list called "secondary reading" which includes people who say interesting things but where I don't feel the need to keep up the same way (or where they post a significant volume of retweets, which I can't filter out in lists the way I can in my main feed). Out of just short of 500 people I'm following, currently 66 are on my core reading list, 23 on my secondary reading list, which leaves slightly over 400 people to be read when I have the leisure time to scroll in more detail. So while I haven't approached anywhere near the asymmetry of the 13,000-follower folks, I'm already drifting into the realm of a significant mis-match between my apparent numbers and my actual interactions.
In terms of how social media promotes my own writing, I have to say that I consider facebook to be only marginally useful. I'm on a number of fb groups related to lesbian books, but find that even in the ones that involved discussion (as opposed to being filled with promotional posts) my work and interests rarely fit into the focus of the group. Being involved in those groups has led to being mutual friends with people I've interacted with there, but when I survey who is actually commenting on or "liking" my posts, extremely few of the interactions are with people I know from the lesbian book groups. My "author" page (which I created largely because I keep my personal feed friends-locked and wanted a public "handle" that people could find easily) is "liked" primarily by people who not only are on my friends list but who are in fact in-person friends of mine. And I refuse to play any of facebook's "pay for exposure" games so it's likely to stay that way.
On twitter, I've not only made a number of very useful contacts for getting my books exposure (e.g., connecting with reviewers) but I've made a number of friends that I hope to expand into the face-to-face realm at some point, as well as reaching a "comfortable to talk with" level with many more people. Twitter has been very useful for gaining a "sense of the field" in publishing, as well as helping me identify new (or old) books I'd be interested in reading, blogs and podcasts I'm interested in following, and so forth. Some of this difference in success may be due to the greater control one has over one's twitter feed (though goodness knows, twitter's been talking about changing that for the worse), but some of it is a matter of the difference in how the networks are structured and how much easier it is to casually join conversations that lead to new contacts. And I suspect some of it has to do with differences in which groups of people are using which social media venues.
By all the rules of "how authors should use social media for promotion" I'm probably an utter failure. But for my own purposes, using my own rules, I've found a few things that work for me rather well.
