As some of you know or don’t know, I’ve joined Instagram, so that’s another thumb tack to add to my ever-widening travels around the social media sphere. Throughout my three years of being an author on social media, I’ve come to develop favorite platforms that I prefer to use much more than others. Even though I’ve just started Instagram, I can tell it’s probably going to be among my favorites. So here are my thoughts on the ones I’ve used so far:
- Facebook. I actually have a short post about Facebook here, but it is my least favorite platform to use. I like platforms that are easy to maintain and don’t require pulling teeth, but this platform does. You have to work unreasonably hard to receive views from your primary followers. Never mind that FB WANTS you to spend money so that way you can up your views–and it’s not even going to be from people who follow you but glorified spam bots. So I simply keep all of my social media connected to it and let that do the updating for me.
- Twitter. Though I try to regularly attract more followers, I can’t get into this platform. I understand there is so much you can do with it, like joining chats being hosted and being able to host one of your own, but Twitter isn’t exciting enough for me. I’ll manually update it–unlike my Facebook–but when 99% of Twitter consists of spam, it’s hard to develop any zest for it. Plus, I don’t like the sparse interactions. I don’t like being limited to a certain amount of words, though, as an author, this is advantageous, as it forces me to compress what my book is about into a few bite-sized words. I also dont like how spiteful followers can be. If you unfollow them for whatever reason, than they’re as likely to unfollow you back. But as far as interacting with others, I can think of better ways to establish a much deeper connection than what 140 characters allows. This isn’t to say I won’t start a Twitter chat of my own, though.
- WordPress. Obviously I love this platform, or else I wouldn’t keep it updated and would probably just spend most of my time re-blogging others’ posts. I love that you can connect this to your other platforms to receive more views. I love the SEO function since you can tag it with keywords so that others can find your posts through search engines. I used to spend a lot of my time gathering followers, but I realize followers don’t matter, insofar as your posts popping up in their inboxes. What matters to me, more than anything else, are the views and unique views my blog receives. You can have thousands of followers, but if you can’t even manage to scrape 50 unique views daily or have more than 30 re-blogs or even likes, what are those followers doing for your blog?
- Tumblr. This is my number one favorite platform and my most popular. Just about every post I write now goes viral and collects me an ample amount of followers. However, what’s interesting is that the posts I write are seen more by non-followers than my actual followers! One post I have has over 7,000 notes, and I don’t even have that many followers. More like 5,000. I also love the fact that Tumblr is very, very simple. You actually want to explore the different tags since Tumblr makes it so easy to do. And because followers are far more willing to explore tags versus other platforms, your posts can be seen more often by people who aren’t following you. I take loads of pride in my Tumblr and all of my super-supportive followers.
- Youtube. I love, love, love this platform, but it is so time consuming and very high maintenance. Yeah, you can just use your webcam, record something, and immediately pop it into Youtube, but if you’re like me, you’ll actually want to edit your videos. For this reason, I haven’t updated my Youtube in forever. With wanting to keep up with my other platforms and the fact that being a writer isn’t my only job, it’s rough. I would love to jump back into it, but doing so isn’t feasible at this moment.
- MailChimp. I love this platform for creating newsletters. It’s super easy to use. I didn’t even require a tutorial to jump in and start using it. It’s also super easy for people to sign up and receive your newsletters. I want to get back into sending a monthly one now that I have a job again as an author. It’s really hard to keep it updated when you have no news about your writing life.
- Instagram. Though it’s new for me, I’m super loving it. It’s simple to use and requires the least exertion among any social media platform. It’s fun to use since you can think of exciting, creative ways of presenting the pic you want to post. Just snap a pic, add a caption, throw in some tags, and there you go! I also love how easy it is to find book bloggers and establish connections with them.
If you don’t use any of the platforms I’ve listed, you’ve at least got to use Instagram.
amberskyeforbes.wordpress.com 