Social Media

Many of you guys out there, young or old, may or may not already be a member of one or more social media sites. I am going to do my best to explain some of them out there and explain the pros and cons of them.

1) FACEBOOK

This isn't particularly fantastic as a thing for advertising your writing. Why? It is being fazed out by Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. It isn't as popular as it once was. All of my friends agree that the only main purpose of it is to keep track of old friends and do massive group invites to night outs or birthday celebrations.

Facebook is a website used for friends more than advertising.

2) TWITTER

Useful. Yes you are restricted to 140 characters per tweet, but just posting links with a short description to your website, promoting your book by saying "GO BUY IT HERE" or just general talking about your writing, characters, word count or even just venting about the day to day is good. It gets you out there. People start recognising you and your Twitter bio, although short, will summarise the kind of person you are. Not to mention it's a quick one click visit to your website.

Before you know it you'll have gathered a number of followers who fall under the category of writer or author or publishing agency/agent. And some of the links they post are helpful. Competitions. Hints. Tips. Words of encouragement. Small articles that we writers will find interesting.

Don't knock it.

3) INSTAGRAM

Pictures. That's what this is. Pictures. Basically you upload a picture to the Instagram website and link that to your other account (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) and you can show off whatever you want. As a writer you could use it to upload pictures of your stories, published books or general everyday stuff.

But you could do that without Instgram anyway.

4) TUMBLR

"Is a microblogging platform and social networking website... The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs as well as make their blogs private." This was probably the original intention. Now a days it is a thing that allows people to post pictures, 'notes' (blogs) and gifs. (short animations or clips taken from life, youtube, TV, cartoons or films.) For a writer I would't recommend it.

5) MYSPACE

This has now become a music industry website. What I mean by this is that it was the Facebook of the 90's until Facebook came along. Now it is used to promote bands, music, songs and allows for music downloads. At least it was the last time I saw it.

6) PINTEREST

This can be used well. I have seen it used well to promote a newly published piece. What it is is a place to post pictures of things you like with a little note or comment of why you've picked it. Let's say you've got a novel soon to be released. In your head you've got the image of your characters and who inspired this image. (celebrities) Pinterest will let you post pictures of those celebrities and you can comment who it resembles in terms of characters. It can also be used for place settings or backdrops, small details that are relevant to your story such as the kind of uniform your characters may wear.

It isn't a too big a thing with writers and authors yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it became popular over the next few years.

7) FLICKR

Another one of those 'picture' sites.

8) LINKEDIN

This is a supposed business networking site. The figures say its popular but in my opinion it isn't all too familiar. Personally I have no intention of using this site but from what I can gather it allows you to show people what your business is/where you work. You can add businesses and people that you know but I wouldn't recommend it. I can see it as something that will faze out.

9) BLOGGER

This is going to have some personal bias to it (I wonder why) but objectively, it is a blogging site. You write a blog post, press publish and it publishes the post to the world wide web. It is simple to use and many writers and authors already use it as a base for an authors/writers website. It's free. It's simple. It's easy. It's just as easy to upload pictures of videos and you can follow other blogs and they can follow you.

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These are probably the 9 most likely websites you are to come across in terms of social media. You could join all 9 of them if you really wished to, but it would take a lot of effort to keep them all going. Not to mention that I wouldn't recommend some of them.

Ones I would recommend and in the order:

1 - Twitter
2 - Blogger
3 - Facebook
4 - Pinterest

Facebook is good for organising events - which I forgot to add - and it's good to have as a domain to connect to family and friends away from the public's eyes. Pinterest was added for the purpose of promotion. If used well you could advertise and promote your book well.

And that was a long post, even for me.

Happy Writing.