Hey,
I jumped into the world of Twitter for the last few weeks. I was reading books on marketing and actually tuned in to a couple of writer’s conferences virtually, all of whom said you should be active on social media. Find your readers and people who are interested in what you are writing.
I am not a social media person, or at least I didn’t think I would enjoy social media. Yeah, I’ve got a Facebook account, but that’s more suited to keeping track of friends and cohorts. It’s not a contact environment and not set up to keep finding new people. It’s fine but it’s also not a place to reach a mass readership.
So I jumped into Twitter. I had an account and did absolutely zilch with it for several years. However, I got on at the end of . . . March. I started poking around, and low and the proverbial “behold” I discovered it’s pretty fun. Who knew?
I’ve found like minded peeps and some crazy souls there (in a good way). There are some funny people out there and I’ve been steadily getting to know different writing people and genre crowds. It’s been a good experience so far.
However–giving credit to Jane Friedman in a book on marketing, she said to pick a couple of social media places to dive into but not all, because you can literally suck all of your time away and never get back to writing. And she’s correct. It’s easy to spend two hours just floating through tweets and notifications and responding back to people.
Yes, in today’s writing world, you should probably be one at least one of the social media platforms, but again, mind your mental health and for the love of the muses, do not let yourself get sucked into worrying about how many followers you have and so on. Just enjoy connecting with other like minded people around the globe.
I’m off to read…not play on social media đŸ˜‰
oh, and if you want to find me: @CraigLCrawford on Twitter.
Craig