Take Advantage!
Image by Sofiaperesoa from Wikimedia Commons
Social media is an asset that many companies, businesses, and bloggers overlook. To be completely honest, I’m one of the people who doesn’t utilize social media platforms in my blog. However, that is not to say I don’t think they’re useful. In fact, it is quite the opposite. As of right now, I use my Facebook for what most people use it for too: procrastination and communication. Whenever I have an extremely unappealing assignment to do or I just have zero interest in a novel that was assigned, I decide that instead of trucking on through the work, I’d rather sit and scroll through my news feed. Now, I know for a fact that I am not the only person who does this when they too have a boring assignment, or maybe just a few minutes to kill. Just think, if all of the people who scrolled through their news feeds saw a post for your blog, maybe they would have something new to look at!
Unfortunately, I have not been using any of my social media outlets to establish readership. I have not used Facebook because I simply think that it is the wrong forum for what I am trying to get out there. My blog is all about creative writing, which means some of the posts are a lot longer than the typical status update. That being said, I don’t believe that the people linked to my Facebook would be compelled to click on a page that contained more text than imagery.
As of right now, I think that WordPress is the most relevant choice for sharing my work. Due to the fact that it is a page built for bloggers, the people who stumble upon my blog are ready for a post longer than 140 characters. Unfortunately, that kind of limits me to the amount of networking I can do via social networking. However, there is always the option to mold my pieces around my readership.
As a way to use social media sites more effectively, I think I need to cater to the wants of the network base. On Twitter for example, if I were to throw out an extremely catchy 1-liner, maybe people would be more interested in reading where it came from and what else I had to say. For Facebook, I could try the same thing; I could make my status a direct quote from one of my pieces and see where that takes me in terms of readership. There are tons of ways to use social media to my advantage, I just have to work on figuring out how to do it, and what sites to use.
Image by mkhmarketing from Flickr
So far, I have only taken advantage of WordPress for networking. I have yet to venture out into the worlds of Facebook and Twitter. However, I think that they would be extremely helpful in establishing readership for my blog, ink, spark, scribble! I can use the catchy one-liners and the interesting statuses that leave readers wanting more to draw them in to my blog. From there, it is just up to me to maintain my presence in social media, as well as keep my readers entertained through my material!
