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.

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

First, let me say that marketing my books and myself is not easy for me. I’m not a pushy person. I would have never succeeded in a traditional sales position. Now, let me tell you about my experiences marketing myself in the plethora of social networking sites available.

I’ve had a personal Facebook page since February 2008. There have been times when I was more active on it than others. Does anyone remember virtual gifting? Gah, that took a lot of time and I couldn’t taste the stinking virtual cookies or wear the very cute virtual shoes. I was on dial up Internet, too, so it took forever to clear my notifications and return favors.

I’ve maintained a blog since 2009. Scrapped it once and reinvented it at least twice. Just like my experience on Facebook, there have been seasons where I was more diligent about posting regularly than others. It’s taken a lot of tweaking and experimenting to establish my blogger “brand”. Brand. Branding. Yikes! Don’t you hate marketing terms?

I joined Good Reads, I don’t remember when, several years ago, even though my Author profile says I joined January 2012. My activity there has also been sporadic. I enjoy trading opinions and reviews, but to do this as much as I want would take a tremendous amount of time, hours and minutes that I feel I must spread around to other sites.

I’ve had something of a social networking presence for quite a few years, but since Still Moments published my first story, I’ve jumped into social networking with both feet. Sometimes the amount of time I put into it feels like a full-time job. So I’m an accountant, a writer, an editor, and a social networker. I’m overwhelmed trying to keep an active, friendly presence on so many sites. I’m not doing a very good job, I think. If I interact enough on one site, the others suffer from lack of attention.

How many copies of my stories sell due to my increased efforts? Okay, I know I’m being transparent here and just a little bit too honest. I’m supposed to be a clandestine marketer, right? Pretend I’m on all these sites to be a friend rather than to entice people to buy my books? Anything more in your face would be tacky, right? Please don’t get me wrong. I enjoy building relationships with other people, and I’ve met some fantastic people through social networking. But let’s face it. A writer is out there trying to sell his/her books.

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 first is build the honest relationships. I want to be a human being first and a marketer second. Then sell the books.

The following is a list of my current social sites and what I think about them. (I’ve commented on some of them in this blog and the remainder will be addressed in part two.)

Twitter

I’ve become absolutely bogged down in Twitter. With nearly 1,000 followers, I can easily say that a very small fraction of them give a crap about anything I post there…if they happen to be online and catch my tweets. The pace moves so fast, so much can be lost and never seen if I don’t inundate the feed with the same post over and over. But if I do that it’s breaking the unspoken don’t be a jerk twitter code.

Out of ten tweets that come up in my feed, five of them will be Triberr feeds from bloggers. One or two of them will be feeds from Hootsuite. Two or three of them will be retweets, mentions, or shout outs. This is part of the unspoken twitter code as well. A tweeter must show appreciation to other tweeters by mentioning follows and retweets. When you get as much traffic and add as many followers on a weekly basis as I do, this gets hard to keep up with without some sort of twitter application to help sort it out.

Maybe one tweet in ten will be an active conversation between online tweeters. Sometimes I wait many minutes for a tweeter who is actually there to interact with a real human being in real time.

Blogger

I love my blog. I think it’s pretty. I’ve worked hard to get it just the way I want it. The title and subtitle tell my readers who I am as a writer. That’s what I want to project to the public.

Sometimes I get discouraged. I’ve found it difficult to entice fellow bloggers to join my follow list. I can spend enormous amounts of time commenting on others’ posts without the return of the favor. I can follow someone’s blog and never even get a nod of acknowledgment and return the favor. Yes, I’ve developed a few relationships with other bloggers and I prize every one of them, because I adore real human interaction. But I wonder sometimes just how much attention we bloggers really pay to our fellow bloggers posts.

We live in a fast paced, busy culture. It takes time to read everyone’s blog posts. So I have to wonder…of the 50 to 100 views I get on every post, how many of those hits actually stop and read the outpourings of my bloggy heart? If I go by the number of comments I receive, not many. One of my recent posts garnered over 100 hits very quickly…without a single viewer stopping to comment.

Maybe short, easy to read posts are the way to go. This piece will certainly be too long. Maybe I should break it into several posts. A series maybe.

Triberr

Oh, Triberr, when I first met you I thought you were the love of my life. How wonderful is the concept? Join a co-op of other bloggers and share each other’s posts. Great idea, right? Post to my blog and my current offering will reach over 266,000 twitter accounts. This sounds great, except the traffic to my blog hasn’t increased significantly. I suspect my fellow tweeters do just like I do. If I happen to be online when the Triberr fed tweet comes up, I might click on the link…if the post sounds remotely interesting and if I have the time. Thus I probably click once for every 25 to 100 tweets…when I’m online. If there is a tweeter out there clicking on every single tweet that comes up in their feed, I’ll show you a very frustrated, tired, and dysfunctional person.