Help! I'm Drowning in Social Sites - Part Two

This is part two of my post about social networking sites. The first part is posted here.

I’ve decided if I want to be more effective something’s gotta give. I can’t do it all, sell books, and build honest relationships. So I think what I’d rather do is build the honest relationships. I want to be a human being first and a marketer second.

So I’ll continue with a list of my current social sites and what I think about them.

Hootsuite

I found this site a few months ago and so far I am pleased with it. Hootsuite offers the convenience of pulling all your social feeds together into one easily accessed place. It also offers the ability of posting/tweeting from their site to your social networking sites. With the added feature of auto scheduling, a blogger/tweeter/facebooker can preload posts for days ahead of time. Thus eliminating the need to constantly post and tweet.

The negative? It doesn’t have the reach Triberr does. Posts will only reach your follower base, not the extended base of every one of your Triberr tribe mates, but then I wonder how far my Triberr reach really is.

Facebook

Some people extol the virtues of Facebook over any other social networking site. I’ve recently added an Author page, but I confess, sometimes I forget it’s there. When I do remember it and scan my home feed, I feel embarrassed I missed so much feed from people I follow. My Facebook presence may have helped me sell two or three books. Maybe.

To me, the problem with Facebook, unlike Twitter’s endless feed of impersonal posts that may or may not be interesting, Facebook posts can offer too much information. On my personal account, five out of ten posts will be from one of two women who share EVERTHING about their personal lives. Neither of these two women are close friends. I don’t want to know every time your cat barfs or your child colors on the walls. I don’t care that you’ve checked in at Chili’s for the hundredth time unless I’m there with you. I would care if we had a personal conversation. Chat me. Message me. Give me something human to human. Snippets of someone’s life and how they’re faring in Farmville don’t tell me anything about the person. That makes it hard to care.

I’m afraid, with social networking sites, we have the semblance of personal interaction without the real communication that develops friendships. Our society has lost something if we don’t know how to be real with each other.

Klout

This site claims to show how effective your social networking presence is via a Klout score, professes to inform the Klouter as to how much influence he/she has, who they influence, and who influences them. Then there are the topics for which the Klouter is influential. I don’t recall being that influential about zombies. I might have used the word once in a blog post. One of my bloggy friends writes about them and I’ve commented on her blog a few times. So how does this make me influential about zombies? I’ve been unable to determine how the site assesses my influence score and what value knowing it is. It appears others have found it a useful tool, but so far I’m unimpressed.

Pinterest

Okay, I can spend hours on Pinterest. There’s something sinisterly (is that a word?) addictive about pinning pictures of things I like/love to my boards. It’s also given me a little bit of insight into the tastes and preferences of people I follow. But beyond being a time killer, I’m not sure what its use is. I keep a collection of recipes on it I’d like to try, but beyond that I don’t think my On the Red Carpet board will ever give me anything more than an occasion to drool over dresses I’ll never own.

And I can’t post the covers of my books/stories on Pinterest because of copyright issues.

Google+

I’ve just upgraded my blog to Google+. It took me awhile due to some technical issues. Okay, my son and I shared a Google account. Me for Blogger. Him for YouTube. In order to use Google+, one of us had to move to a new account because we couldn’t share a profile. It was easier for me than for him. It took me some time to figure out how to do it, but I finally did, without losing my site URL or any content. It was surprisingly easy…once I found the right site to tell me the right procedure. (Hint: exporting and importing your blog isn’t the way to go. Too much work. Simply add your new Google account to your list of existing authors on your blog. Then make the new account the Administrator and remove the old account from the author list. If you won’t more information on how to do this go here here.)

I haven’t had a lot of experience on this site yet, but it appears it could work a lot like Facebook if it become more popular. So far very few of my connections are signed up with Google+.

Good Reads

This is an excellent site for sharing opinions and reviews about books. It’s a social community where a member can join a group of other readers with similar tastes. It allows me to put myself out there as a writer as well, thus I have an Author Profile page.

It’s a site by readers for readers. I love the interaction with other readers I’ve had. Unfortunately, I haven’t spent as much time on this site as I would like. My first love is reading. My love for the written word fostered my passion for writing. If you’re interested, you can read my post, Finding My Passion, to get an idea of my journey towards finding my passion for writing.

I think of all the sites, I regret the most letting my activity on this lapse. This is where my heart and soul is. But like so many other sites, it’s been difficult to get reviews of my own works and even harder to get people to follow me as a fan.

What more can I do in this abundance of social sites to be human, develop relationships, and grow a fan base?

Well, here’s my plan. I’m going to limit my time on Triberr and Twitter. There are a couple of group chats on Twitter at the same time every week I want to get involved with. I'll grow my blog followers the old-fashioned way by being a follower/commenter myself. Use my time effectively by developing interpersonal relationships, which is more important to me than my Triberr reach. Use Hootsuite to preload my tweets/Facebook posts for the week. This will take time and effort, but I think it will be time well spent.

So apologies to my Triberr tribe mates, but I won’t be posting every one of your posts on my Twitter feed any longer. If the post would interest me if I saw it on Twitter, then I’ll repost it. And I expect my Triberr mates to do the same for me. I don’t expect more than I’m willing to give.