Back in March, you may have seen my post about social networking and how useful a tool it can be. I still stand by that statement with the exception of a few things. 

Facebook is a good social networking tool. Remember how I said to connect with as many people as possible to expand your presence? You should. And joining discussion groups on Facebook is a good idea too. If you are published, your publisher may have its own authors group. Definitely join. It will save you a lot of unanswered questions. Facebook is a really good tool.

However, Facebook has this funny way of preventing you from adding friends like crazy. I have been blocked before. This is basically like putting a hold on your account for a certain length of time. You can do everything except add new friends and send direct messages to people you aren’t connected with. The only way you can get new friends is if people add you and then you confirm. I know it's not great while you're waiting for the wonderful people at Facebook to take the hold off of your account, but it's something. I think part of it is Facebook’s fault. The other reason you get blocked is because the people you have tried to add have nothing better to do than to report to Facebook that you are a complete stranger or are spamming them. It is simple. They don’t have to confirm you as a friend. They can simply hit “ignore”. Instead, they chose to report you. The only good reason I see for blocking someone is if they are sending you creepy or threatening messages. That is just my take on being blocked. Unfortunately, Facebook has their own rules. So, that is one of the disadvantages of adding friends like crazy on Facebook.

LinkedIn is still a tool I would recommend. Having said that, there is one hiccup you’re bound to come across at some point. LinkedIn lets you join 50 different discussion groups. This is nice if you have joined good ones. It is not so nice if you have not. I mentioned the notifications you’d receive before. Just be sure to change the notification settings on each of your groups so you’re not bombarded with messages in your inbox. 

The one thing I want to cover with LinkedIn today is knowing what those groups are about. Read the rules of each group. The moderators can get really picky with what they allow. I encourage you to join discussions. Make sure your website and any other information is on your profile so others can see it and link to it. Posting discussions can get hairy though. You need to decide if what you post goes with that specific group. One of my discussions was removed recently and I was flagged to be moderated in the future. All I posted was the fact that I was interviewed by a blogger. It’s not like I was doing multi-level marketing and trying to get people to look at and buy a specific product. I was just excited about the interview. So sue me. LOL. For future reference, just keep an eye on what you’re posting and what the group is all about.

Twitter is also a neat tool to use. You can tweet about pretty much anything from your book to interviews to where you went to eat last night to how you took your dog for a walk. I’m not kidding about the last two. People actually do that. Nowadays, it’s becoming the standard to talk about things besides what you really want to post. That is why you see the celebrities you follow tell everyone they just ate a bag of Doritos or painted their toe nails. Really? That’s nice. I know. Not very exciting. And not very hopeful for the burgeoning writer.

So, there are a few things you can do to ramp up your presence on Twitter. Sure, you can post news about your writing. I recommend it. Also, try to gain a following by following other authors or your own interests (i.e. companies or brands you like, people you admire). Chances are they’ll follow you back. And on the left side of the page, Twitter gives you recommendations, kind of like the age old, "if you like this, you'll like this" notion. And always try to follow those who have followed you on Twitter. If someone direct messages you, asking a random question like, “What is your favorite food?” or maybe they want to talk about how they just finished a needlepoint project, go ahead and reply back. This puts out the idea that your efforts are not self-serving and you actually do want to talk to people, which is most likely the case. The downside of Twitter is this: some of the people you follow are not exactly professional, and you may get some pretty nasty comments or propositions. The best way to handle this is to go through your list of followers and unfollow those rude people. They may still follow you, but by unfollowing them, you have just saved yourself a big headache and a ton of embarrassment.

In my previous article, I did not mention any other tools that could help you network and give you more of a presence. But, I will now. Some of these include blogging and email lists. Blogging is a good tool. Start your own blog. Find a niche market, something to write about. You want to write about writing? Go ahead. You want to tell people how much you love baking pies? You can do that. In most cases, if you say you’re a writer somewhere on your profile and have a link to your website, curiosity alone will cause people to go there. Will they buy your book? I don’t know. But, it’s worth a try. The important thing is you have something to offer people, something that brings them back to the blog again and again. You’ll get subscribers. That’s a good thing. You’re building a web presence. I have two blogs, one that showcases my books and one that is all about writing. Obviously, you’re here so you know which one is which. LOL. Then, you want to look up ways to advertise your blog. There are many sites where you can list your blog and thereby draw attention to it.

Now, I’m going to say something about email lists. Sure, you can take a bunch of your connections and email them like wild about your books, etc. But, I don’t recommend it. You’re mainly going to piss people off. They’ll end up blocking you in some form or other. And you’ll get some replies back, mostly ones like, “Stop emailing me” or “Take me off your mailing list”. The same could happen if you buy email lists. But, if you go that route, mostly what you’ll get is a bunch of non-deliverable emails sent back because those emails were out of date. Probably the best thing to do is to make connections or even friends on LinkedIn, Twitter or in real life and simply ask them if it’s okay to put them on a mailing list for updates or news on your books/writing. 

So, that’s my spiel for the day, folks. Yes, there are a few disadvantages to social networking. I’m sure there are more than I even listed. But, without these tools, we would have no presence as writers. Gone are the days when all books ended up on shelves in libraries or bookstores. This is the digital age. E-books are the thing. If someone can read a book on their Kindle or Nook, then we have to use the tools provided to us in the digital age to try to reach those readers. Though I love traditional books as much as anyone else, even I have to evolve with the times. 

Thanks for reading! Keep an eye out for further posts. I am still hosting author interviews, guest blog articles, and I am beginning to take guest book reviews on my blog. Enjoy, or read back through the archives of Writing in the Modern Age. Have a great day!

Check out our latest Writing in the Modern Age blog article here.

Guest Blogger Bio

 Stefan Vucak is an award-winning author of the sci-fi Shadow Gods series of books. His contemporary political thriller Cry of Eagles has won the coveted 2011 Readers Favorite silver medal award.

Website: www.stefanvucak.com

Check out our latest Writing in the Modern Age blog article here.

Okay, so we’ve all heard that to make it in the new publishing world, we have to promote, promote, promote! Sigh. Unfortunately, it’s true. It is important to maintain author accounts on significant social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Did I miss any? Probably. I’ve heard Pinterest is up and coming, but that is not what I’m going to talk about here.

LinkedIn was at one time a social networking site for mainly the business world. Now, it still is, but tons of people use it. If you do decide to create an account on LinkedIn, make sure you connect to as many people as possible. As I have tons of accounts (one for each pen name…LOL), this is a hard thing to do. For the benefit of this blog, I’ll only mention my Marie Lavender identity. LOL. To this day, it still gets me that I have so many pen names, but I digress.

On LinkedIn, I have 1126 connections. What? How did that happen? Network, network, network. If someone wants to connect with you, do it. The more connections you have, the more potential readers you’ll have. Or peers. Fellow writers always come in handy because you can ask them questions. And they may recommend you to someone else. Cool, right? Mostly, I do it because I feel an affinity with other writers. We’re all going through the same thing. Also, try to reach out to as many people as you can and connect with them. If LinkedIn is suggesting you connect with five people, take the suggestion. LinkedIn will make suggestions depending on if you happen to be connected to someone else in that person’s network. LinkedIn has a three tier system for networking. The first level is who you’re connected to. The second is who those people are connected to. And the third…well, for the most part you don’t need to be concerned with them. They are so out of your reach, it would be a miracle if you ever connected to people like them. Think Bill Gates. But, if you happen to connect to Bill Gates, good for you. Those “third” connections are persons of influence. 

So, on to my next thing about LinkedIn. The other way to gain more connections is to join groups. Yes, I did say “groups”. Discussion groups are a time-consuming process, but believe me, they foster a lot of learning and networking. Try to join discussion groups that have a lot of members, and are about a subject you’re genuinely interested in. If you like making pottery, don’t join a comic book club. You get the idea. And LinkedIn lets you have about 50 groups, so you have a lot to choose from. Considering there’s about a million discussion groups on LinkedIn (I could be exaggerating...then maybe I'm not), you have your work cut out for you. In some cases, the moderator of the group will have to approve you to let you in. Nowadays, a lot of discussion groups are becoming open groups so it may be easier for you. 

Once you are in a group, you can post discussions. Yes, some people take this to the extreme and use it as an advertising tool. “Please look at my book….please go to my website…buy my pet rocks…” But, this is a sure-proof way to get the moderator to block you or boot you from the group. You can advertise, but please, oh please…do it sparingly. The thing you want to focus on here is the discussions posted asking someone else’s opinion about a topic or advice. If you have something to say, comment on the discussion.  Be mindful of your image, however.  You can choose to follow the discussion, and you will receive email notifications about other comments from group members. And if you’d like to post a question, go ahead. In most cases, you will get a response. You will get a ton of emails once you join a group though. Not only because of these discussions you participated in, but because of the discussions posted in the group overall. You’ll receive updates. Thankfully, you can change your notification settings when you click on each group. You can tell it to only send those once a day, once a week, etc. Take advantage of that, or you’ll end up screaming in frustration at the craziness in your inbox. 

The other thing you can do on LinkedIn is create a discussion group. If you really feel there aren’t many groups that interest you and you think there’s a niche for it, then make one. Be sure to make the rules for the group clear, and the description as accurate as possible. You can invite your connections to the group. You can sit and wait for people to join. In some cases, it totally works. In others, not so much. Really consider what you’re doing when you start a discussion group. For one of my accounts, I created a romance writing discussion group, and it has gone very well. People are posting discussions all of the time. For another account, that didn’t go so well. I had plenty of members, but no one wanted to say anything. You will have to post the occasional discussion in your group to actually foster discussion. And moderation is very important. You will have to approve members quite often and approve discussions. Occasionally, you’ll get someone that posts the same topic/advertising tool like crazy, and you have to delete those posts or it will make the group look bad. In some cases, you may have to tell that person the group is not a forum to advertise, but a “discussion” group. Again, I digress. But, forming a group can be a powerful tool, if that’s what you want to do and you have the time to moderate it.

There are ways of advertising on LinkedIn. Yes, you can send a blitz of messages to your connections, but you may get some pretty hateful replies in return. LinkedIn has paid advertising just like Google, if you want to do that. LinkedIn offers free accounts as well, but there are paid accounts that will give you more power. Do that if your budget allows it. For most of us writers, at least at the start of our careers, our budgets are pretty meager so we have to evaluate things like this.

On to the next tool. Facebook. Facebook can be a pretty useful medium. Once you have an account, you can “friend” people. At first, it might seem like you don’t know anybody. You want to look up your friends from high school? You can do that. You want to connect with other writers? You can do that. Facebook will suggest friends for you like LinkedIn does. Take the suggestion. The more friends you have, the better. Right now, I have 870 friends. Also, if you are an author, you will want to find fellow author’s pages and “like” them. They will likely connect with you and “like” your page if you have one. Like other people’s pages if you want too. 

Yes, you can create a page. It’s free, and it’s a very useful tool. You can create an author page and a page for each of your books. For some writers, this is very nice because once they reach the maximum amount of friends that Facebook allows, they can refer people to this page. If you are connecting with other authors, you’ll understand exactly what I mean very shortly. Then, you want to try to get people to “like” your page (or pages, if you have more than one). Sure, you can message people like crazy, but this can also get a pretty unsavory response. Believe me. LOL. You don’t want that can of worms. 

The best thing to do next is to join some discussion groups. “Oh, no!” you say. Not more discussion groups. Yes, my minions. LOL. Just kidding.  You should join more groups. On Facebook, you really don’t need to join that many. Between five or ten is a good number. Sometimes people will automatically add you to their groups, which can be good and bad. You can choose to leave at anytime, of course, just liked you can on LinkedIn.  Within these groups, you can post questions and present topics. 

The other thing is “events”. You may get invited to join “events.” Sometimes it’s a book signing or release. You can choose to join or decline. Or click “maybe” if you don’t know yet. In my case on two of my accounts, it was a “Liking” event. This was very, very cool because a bunch of authors joined it. And all of us started “liking” each other’s pages. And yes, you need as many likes as possible on your pages. In some cases, you can even encourage people to “like” your Amazon book page, if Amazon still allows that.   Never forget to return the favor of liking. If someone likes you or your book page, do the same. It’s only fair.

If you want to get the word out, Facebook has advertising too, and it’s cool if it’s within your budget. But, I don’t even have that kind of budget right now so I can’t give you advice in that regard.

The next tool is Twitter. Ah, Twitter. The wonderful Twitter where you can “tweet” like crazy. You can create your author account here. Yes, it is an advertising tool for the most part. Or it seems like that. It doesn’t have to be. If you are a new member, you will need to “follow” your interests. Most likely, Twitter will offer a tutorial. Once you have established what interests you, Twitter will make suggestions based on that. You can also search for what you want to follow. If you like healthcare, follow the CDC.  If you like Taylor Swift (*shudder), follow her.  If you like writing, follow other authors and their books. In most cases, people will “follow” you back.

You want to get as many followers as possible. This may seem hard. It will look as if you follow more than you’re followed. Keep pushing forward. You will also receive notifications about Tweets the people you’ve followed have posted. Yes, it does make your inbox crazy. I believe you can change the notification settings here too.   Another tip. With Twitter, you can customize your profile with your book cover, author pic or other background to make it look nice. Other people will see this when they follow you. Because you do want a lot of followers, I will give you this.  

Recently, I heard of a way to actually buy followers. I haven’t tried it yet, but it might be a decent way to get potential readers. As of right now, I have 181 followers. I’m getting there! LOL. 
As always, I’m still learning. We all try to pick stuff up every day to keep promoting ourselves as authors. Do you have any tips for writers in the modern age? Want to write an article for my blog here or maybe you’d like me to interview you? Please email me at marieannlavender@gmail.com and I’ll get back to you promptly.

 

Check out our latest Writing in the Modern Age blog article here.